In line with our commitment to fully support the XForms specification, we now clearly document the level of support for each part of the specification in a compliance matrix.

The <xforms:select> and <xforms:select1 controls let the end-user select on of more items from a list. You can now add the selection="open" attribute on those controls; when specified, the end-user can enter a value of its choice in text field, of choose one of more of the suggested values.

You can now use the src attribute on <xforms:label>, <xforms:hint>, <xforms:help>, <xforms:alert>, and <xforms:message> to specify the URL from where the text should be loaded, instead of having the text inline in the XForms view or in the XForms instance (ref or bind attribute).

In your XForms views, in addition of using the ref and nodeset attributes to reference nodes of the XForms instance, you can now use the bind attribute. You first assign an id to a nodeset in the XForms model: e.g. <xforms:bind nodeset="/company/ceo" id="ceo"/>; you then reference this id in your XForms view: e.g. <xforms:input bind="ceo"/>.

You can now nest <xforms:bind> elements in the XForms model. The nodeset XPath expression in nested elements is relative to the nodeset selected by the nodeset expression on the parent element.

You can now use the XPath 2.0 doc() function in XPath expressions in the XForms model. For instance, assuming that you have a "lookup table" defined in an XML file mapping department id to department name, you can write a model item property calculating the value of <department-name> element based on the value entered by the user for <department-id>:

In this version the names generated by OPS for HTML form elements are much shorter than in previous versions. Under certain circumstances (low bandwidth between server and end-user, large forms, complex XForms instances with many levels of nested elements using namespaces), submitting a form was slow as a lot of data had to be sent from the browser back to the server. A new name generation scheme has been implemented in this version. It solves the problem and guaranties that names will be short even if your XForms instance has many levels of nested elements and is using namespaces.

In previous versions of OPS, when a form was submitted and the XForms instance recreated, all the elements and attribute where in the right namespace, but the actual prefix was not necessarily kept and namespace declarations where inserted only where used. In this version, Presentation Server keeps the exact value of the prefixes and the location of namespace declaration when a form is submitted and the XForms instance is recreated.

The XForms extension control xxforms:hidden is supported again and documented.

The <xxforms:choose> used to run all the "true" <xxforms:when>. Instead, it now only run the first one if any, and the <xxforms:otherwise> otherwise. This is inline with the behavior of the <xsl:choose>.

<xforms:message> is now supported. This lets you display a message in a dialog when a submit control is clicked. See the message action documentation for more details.

• The SQL processor now supports external datasource definitions using the optional datasource input. Those directly refer to connections without using JNDI names mapped by the container. This allows examples to work out of the box. This is an example of datasource definition:

  <datasource><!-- Specify the driver for the database --><driver-class-name>org.hsqldb.jdbcDriver</driver-class-name><!-- This causes the use of the embedded database --><uri>jdbc:hsqldb:file:orbeondb</uri><!-- Optional username and password --><username>sa</username><password/></datasource>

• OPS ships with a recent version of HSQLDB (version 1.7.2.8).

• The SQL processor now supports reading BINARY, VARBINARY and LONGVARBINARY columns in addition to BLOB.

• The SQL processor's data input and output are now optional. This removes the need for "dummy" input content or Null serializers with the SQL processor.

9.2.1. Relative URLs

9.2.2. XInclude Dependencies

The Java processor now works correctly in command line mode. It also supports relative source paths and supports specifying alternate compilers.

The Email processor now supports Cc and Bcc recipients. See the Email example for an illustration.

The Scope generator is now able to marshall regular JavaBeans in addition to XML stored as Strings, W3C and dom4j documents. This functionality deprecates the Bean generator. These two processors previously had some overlap in functionality.

The error processor now follows the same configuration mechanism as the main processor. The following property names have been deprecated:

• oxf.servlet.error.processor.uri
• oxf.servlet.error.input.*

The new names are as follows:

• oxf.error-processor.name
• oxf.error-processor.input.*

Visit Packaging and Deployment for more information on configuring the error processor, as well as Error Pipeline for information about creating an error pipeline.