How can I add a "category" to forms, in addition to the "app" and "form"?

Question

I have changed the code of Orbeon Form Builder to add a new input field in dialog-form-settings.xbl:

<xf:input ref="category" id="fb-category-input" xxf:autocomplete="off">
     <xf:label>Category</xf:label>
     <xf:hint>input Category</xf:hint>
</xf:input>

<!-- Dispatch event with result -->
<xf:dispatch name="fb-update-metadata" targetid="fb-dialog-form-settings">
    <xf:property name="app"         value="instance()/app"/>
    <xf:property name="form"        value="instance()/form"/>
    <!-- Add By Haibpl -->
    <xf:property name="category"        value="instance()/category"/>
    <!-- End Add -->
    <xf:property name="title"       value="instance()/title"/>
    <xf:property name="description" value="instance()/description"/>
    <xf:property name="logo" value="instance()/logo"/>
    <xf:property name="mode"        value="instance()/mode"/>
</xf:dispatch>

In crud.xpl, how can i get value of category like app (/request/app)?

Answer 1

My recommendation most likely won't be what you're looking for, but here it is anyway: try to avoid making changes to Form Builder and Form Runner. Those changes can be hard to port to new versions of Orbeon Forms, make it hard to upgrade, and then, if you are stuck with an older version, to get support for it.

Also, while you can get help from Orbeon for these type of customizations under a Dev Support subscription, customization are not covered by PE subscriptions, and you won't get much help in the community either, as this isn't something we'd like to encourage.

So, have you thought of using the "app" as the "category"? And if you need both an "app" and a "category", have you thought about putting both in the "app" field with say a dash in between? E.g. hr-applications, instead of having an app hr and a category application?