newbie question: orbeon form builder -> ODK runtime?

I am new to Orbeon and XForms, but wondering if this is a reasonable question:

My understanding of XForms is they are a "standard" - i.e. transportable between implementations. So, I am wondering: can I author forms in Orbeon, save them, perhaps tweek the bindings of where completed forms get POSTed/persisted to, and run them in offline mode using Open Data Kit on Android devices?  


thank you
Chris

Chris,

Not without quite a bit of work.

Yes XForms is a standard, but implementations tend to have extensions and incompatibilities. For example Orbeon Forms has been using XPath 2 for more than a decade (since before it was even a W3C recommendation), and some implementations don't support XPath 2 yet (support is being standardized in XForms 2.0). Orbeon Forms also heavily uses a component model based on XBL, etc.

See also this FAQ:

    https://github.com/orbeon/orbeon-forms/wiki/FAQ-~-Orbeon-Form-Builder-and-Orbeon-Form-Runner#can-the-forms-designed-with-form-builder-run-in-other-xforms-engines

This said, a determined developer could probably implement a transformation, for example with XSLT, between forms produced with Form Builder and what another implementation supports. The fact that form definitions are serialized as XML should in fact make this reasonably easy.

-Erik