It sounds like you’re pretty much wanting to do what my sample form is doing. My sample form has a few XML data files for various languages that you can load in order to change the captions of various fields to the selected language.

The problem with XML data files is that they’re files. In this case, there’s no way around requiring the user to be part of the process. The best you can do is give them a button on your form which, when clicked, opens the Import Data dialog by using the following statement in the button’s Click event:

xfa.host.importData();

This will open the Import Data dialog where the user can find the appropriate XML data file for the language they want and load it into the form in order to change the captions.

The reason behind this security: Acrobat cannot allow a form to access files on a user’s system without the user’s explicit consent. Requiring the user to choose the XML data file to load into the form implies consent, albeit it doesn’t provide for the best user experience. With Acrobat 8.1, there’s also increased security for ODBC and web service data connections whereby Acrobat will ask the user to allow the connection (by clicking on an “Allow” button in a popup dialog) prior to establishing the data connection.

Thanks in advance
Julia

Your question was very interesting. So much so that I decided to write an entry about it:

Tracking Mouse Clicks

Let me know what you think.

I’ve got another unrelated question. I’m wondering if it’s possible to track the coordinates of a click inside an image field? What I’m wanting to do is to have something like an interactive pie chart for example, where clicking on one of the areas would change something else on the form. I could do this with a simple if statement inside the click event of the field – if I knew the coordinates of the click.

A somewhat hack of this that I have more hope of working is to build the image out of multiple image fields and simply put different scripts on the separate image fields. Oh well, if you have any insight or an opinion on this please share. Thanks,

-Zack

But now, that you did it first, maybe you can also use these ideas, if you find them interesting:
– attach the xml files to the pdf document (so that they are not stand-alone files)
– have the locale in a combo-box, populated at load-time with the languages in attachments, and update the labels when the user changes the selection