Orbeon and REST API

Question

We use Orbeon with a custom REST interface with Apache CXF and we were wondering why does Orbeon Builder allow multiple sets of the same application/form? Of course each set gets it's own documentId but on publish each form overwrites the other (given the same app/form)

So what was the idea behind that? It is manageable with a couple of forms but we are looking at 300+ forms with multiple users building forms with the builder. Besides the possibility of user error when renaming a form and by accented overwriting another on publish it is quite a head ache from an administration point of view.

Speaking about the REST api:

We would like to return meaningful error messages from the persistence layer to the ui. Is that possible with the current builds of Orbeon and if so how? The 404/500 error message doesn't get displayed.

I hope Orbeon / another SO user could give us some insights about that.

Answer 1

It's mainly for historical reasons. We have an RFE to improve on this. Versioning, which is almost completely implemented now, will better allow handling multiple versions of a given form definition.

It's currently not possible to propagate error messages to the UI in the general case. It's possible upon Publish or when using the result-dialog when submitting, if the service returns an HTML response.