Duane,

This is an excellent question.

From the XForms spec's point of view, if submission fails, an
xforms-submit-error event is thrown and that's it, which is not
extremely helpful. Some tips:

1. If you are using XML schema for instance validation and suspect that
validation may be failing because validation doesn't pass, try using an
online schema validator with your submitted XForms instance.

2. You can enable server-side logging for XForms with:

<category name="org.orbeon.oxf.xforms.processor.XFormsServer">
   <priority value="debug"/>
</category>

in log4j.xml, the XForms instance that failed to be saved will be logged
with some annotations.

This can help a little bit, but I agree that this is not enough. We have
an RFE for a client-side XForms console, which would be the right place
to provide useful information about submission:

http://forge.objectweb.org/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=304142&group_id=168&atid=350210

This will be post-3.0 however.

-Erik

Duane Gran wrote:
>  Is there anyway to get a more elaborate error message for an xforms-
> submit-error event?  I find that I spend a lot of time feeling in the  
> dark for simple mistakes I make which prevent the form from saving.  
> Although I capture the event successfully, I'm often at a loss about  
> the cause of the error.
>
> Duane