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Ethan Gruber edited this page Sep 18, 2025 · 1 revision

Orbeon is a the XForms processor that handles all of the back end editing and publication. Additionally, with the XML Pipeline Language (XPL), it handles the public user interface, interacting with Apache Solr and the Nomisma SPARQL endpoint and APIs to bind a variety web services together into a cohesive framework.

There exists some issue in the latest Orbeon Community Edition (2024.1) not delivering xml serializations through XPL pipelines with a .xml extension, Nomisma should use 2023.1 CE.

Download and unzip Orbeon CE 2023.1. Within the root folder in this zip file, you'll find orbeon.war. Extract orbeon.war and place in the Tomcat webapps folder.

Note: You must use the 2023.1 Community Edition on Tomcat10.

$TOMCAT_HOME = /var/lib/tomcat10

Several minor configurations need to be applied to Orbeon.

  • Allow symlinks within the Orbeon webapp directory structure:
    • Create orbeon.xml in $TOMCAT_HOME/conf/Catalina/localhost
    • Insert the XML: <Context path="/orbeon" docBase="/var/lib/tomcat10/webapps/orbeon"><Resources allowLinking="true" /></Context>
    • Save the file.
    • Ensure the file is readable by tomcat, e.g., chown tomcat:tomcat orbeon.xml
  • Set the plain theme:
    • Edit $TOMCAT_HOME/webapps/orbeon/WEB-INF/resources/config/properties-local.xml.template, insert within <properties>: <property as="xs:anyURI" name="oxf.epilogue.theme" value="oxf:/config/theme-plain.xsl"/>
    • Save file. Rename properties-local.xml.template to properties-local.xml and be sure that Tomcat owns it: chown tomcat:tomcat properties-local.xml

Logging

Logging is controlled by log4j.xml. See XForms Logging for more information. Note: You'll probably need to change the log paths from relative to absolute. The default Tomcat log directory is /var/log/tomcat10

Finally, restart Tomcat for these changes to take effect: sudo service tomcat10 restart

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