Linking to Your Forms

Rationale

When you create a form with Form Builder, you pick an application name and form name for that form. For instance, for a marriage registration, you might choose clerk as the application name, and marriage-registration as the form name.

When you publish the form, assuming you have Orbeon Forms deployed on a server on http://www.city.gov/forms, citizen will be able to fill out a new marriage registration by going to http://www.city.gov/forms/fr/clerk/marriage-registration/new.

In a typical deployment, users will access this page from another part of your web site or web application that contains a link to form served by Orbeon Forms. For instance, a city government might have on its web site a page listing forms citizen can fill out, which links to the marriage registration form on http://www.city.gov/forms/fr/clerk/marriage-registration/new.

Page on your web site/app linking to a form

Technology agnostic

Linking doesn't make any assumption on the technology used by the web site or application you're linking from. Your site could use Drupal, WordPress, be served by IIS, using .NET, or any other technology. For instance, the diagram below is for a situation where your web site is served by Microsoft IIS, implemented in .NET, and links to forms served by Orbeon Forms.

IIS front-end

Paths

The /fr/clerk/marriage-registration/new in our example is what is referred to below as a path, and for a given form, multiple such paths exist. Knowing what those paths are is particulary important as this allows you to link from your web site or web application to forms your created with Form Builder. All the paths are relative to the deployment context, i.e. where you've deloyed Orbeon Forms, which in our example was http://www.city.gov/forms.

  • Summary page for a given form definition: /fr/[APPLICATION_NAME]/[FORM_NAME]/summary
  • New empty form data: /fr/[APPLICATION_NAME]/[FORM_NAME]/new
  • Edit existing form data: /fr/[APPLICATION_NAME]/[FORM_NAME]/edit/[DOCUMENT_ID]
  • Read-only HTML view: /fr/[APPLICATION_NAME]/[FORM_NAME]/view/[DOCUMENT_ID]
  • Read-only PDF view: /fr/[APPLICATION_NAME]/[FORM_NAME]/pdf/[DOCUMENT_ID]
  • Read-only TIFF view: [SINCE Orbeon Forms 4.11] /fr/[APPLICATION_NAME]/[FORM_NAME]/tiff/[DOCUMENT_ID]