Ability to pull published form back into Form Builder

[evlist]

It would be nice to have a feature to "revert" a FB form, ie copy the form from where it's been published into FB data repository.

This could be used in two cases:

• you're not happy with the updates you've made to a form since it was last published and want to revert to the published version;
• you've made updates to the published form and you want to get these updates back in FB.

This might fall under a "versioning" umbrella. Only supporting the form to be reverted to the last published version is somewhat limited. Instead, we could imagine to have:

• support for explicit versioning, where users explicitly express their interest to create a new version, as done in revision control system;
• support for automatic versioning, à-la Dropbox, Time Machine, or IntelliJ's local history.

[avernet]

I changed the label from RFE to Use cases, as this is a valid use case, but we are not quite sure what the "feature" that would support this is (also see my comments at the end of the description).

[ebruchez]

With #1055, we have unified the code to publish form definitions and attachments. This is used:

• by Form Builder to publish forms
• by the autosave mechanism to move form definitions and attachments from draft to non-draft
• by the Form Runner Home page to push and pull form definitions and attachments to and from a remote server

So this feature would now be quite easy to implement.

[ebruchez]

One thing to think about: section templates are inlined as xbl:xbl when published. When pulling, if section templates are present, we might want to take some action. But should we keep them in the form, or something else?

[ebruchez]

#1450 contains a similar idea. Closing that one and moving @avernet's comment below:

This would enable form authors to edit:

• the published form if the non-published version has been deleted, maybe by mistake;
• the published form if the non-published version contains changes that are not desirable anymore;
• with versioning, previously published version of the form.

Editing of a published form could be triggered:

• from the home page, in admin mode;
• when a form is loaded in Form Builder, if we notice that it has already been published.

The former has the benefit of handling use case 1 above.

[avernet]

+1 from community

[ebruchez]

+1 from evaluator

[avernet]

+1 from customer

[avernet]

+1 from customer

[ebruchez]

+1 from customer

[ebruchez]

+1 from customer

[ebruchez]

We need to do this soon.

The open question is that of section templates. When publishing, a snapshot of the latest versions of the required section templates is embedded into the form definition.

In Form Builder, however, the latest version of the section templates will be loaded when the toolbox is refreshed. That latest version might not be the same that was used by the published form definition.

For example:

• publish acme/library v2
• publish acme/order v3
  • which uses automatically acme/library v2
• time passes
• publish acme/library v3
• publish acme/order v4
  • which uses automatically acme/library v3
• "pull" acme/order v3
  • but latest version of acme/library is v3
  • we'd like instead maybe to tell the form definition to use v2

This tells me that:

• There should be information in the published form definition about which version of the section template library was used at publish time.
• Form Builder should allow a form definition to use a specific version of a library.

2024-10-11: The above was done with #3885, released with 2019.1. So the versioning is no longer a concern, although there is the question of checking whether the libraries are published and present when "pulling" the form.

[avernet]

+1 from customer

[ebruchez]

Starting Orbeon Forms 2019.1, the section template library versions are stored into the form definition metadata (#3885).

[ebruchez]

So now this feature should be easy to implement.

Where should the UI be located? Right now, the Form Builder Summary page doesn't show published form definitions, so until we have that (#1795, #1138, #2777) the feature should not be accessible from there, probably. Or it would be in the form a "See Published Form Definitions" button which would show this information separately.

On the Form Builder Detail page, the feature could be accessible from the "New" form dialog.

Any other possibility?

[ebruchez]

+1 from customer

[avernet]

+1 from customer

[avernet]

+1 from customer

[avernet]

+1 from customer

[ebruchez]

+1 from customer

[avernet]

+1 from customer

[avernet]

+1 from customer

[ebruchez]

Things to check:

• whether the libraries used by the published form definition are still published and present when "pulling" the form
  • if not, what is the path forward?

[ebruchez]

Following #6518, this could be integrated into the templates UI.