Question

We want to use Orbeon Forms to build and run some forms, however these forms require some more explaining than is possible in the ‘hint’ or ‘help’ sections. (‘hint’ is supposed to be rather short, ‘help’ does not support any kind of formatting, as far as i can tell) Therefore, I’d like to put some HTML above or below some of the questions (controls).

Now, I know that there is an option that shows you the source and allows you to make changes. This is, however, quite complex for a non-technical person.

Is there a(nother) way of inserting pieces of HTML in a form?

Also, I have looked at ways of creating a control that outputs/shows HTML, however it seems that both XBL and the Java classes for XForms controls always assume that it should be bound to some variable that’s also in the resulting XML document. (And I’d rather not have that, since it will just be clarifying text.) Though it could be that I overlooked another possible option in XBL or Java.

Is it possible to create a component that does not get bound to the XML instance? (That I can then use to create a control that provides HTML functionality.)

Answer 1

• For HTML in help message, Form Builder supports form authors entering a help message as HTML since version 4.4.
• We often get requests for a control allowing form authors to enter their own HTML from Form Builder, this isn’t yet implemented, at the point of this writing, and we have an RFE (#507) to cover this.