I’m guessing you included some code with a “<” bracket in it and it got wiped-out so I can’t help you there. If you re-post it, replace any “&lt” brackets with “&lt;”.

Yes, you can render a form as a form guide without the PDF. LC Forms will have a switch you can set (or not) to choose whether to include the PDF with the form guide.

As for your last question, I’m guessing you’re trying to get the form guide to show-up within some other framework. As I understand it, this can be done by using an iframe and setting its source to the HTML stub returned from a call to LiveCycle Forms’ “renderform” API. Using this API call, you can request that a particular form be rendered as a form guide and the HTML stub returned will contain the code necessary to display the form guide rendered by LC Forms. I’ve never done this myself but I’ve seen it done before.

I now understand the PIs solution, thank you. However, I think I will not be able to use them because I don´t know, at (template) design-time, how many PIs I will need. Because I only need to add paragraphs one after another, I believe I will only need to add this kind of instruction, one after another (in each process activity) to the xdp I will be creating:

What do you think would be the best approch to add this line of code to a xdp file in an activity? Do you think xpath would be the best approch?

Another question I would like to make is about the start of the process and more specifically formguides. I know that to create a formguide, one needs to have a template as a source. However, is it possible to delivery only the formguide to the user invoking it without delivering the pdf? I ask this because what I really need is the data captured in the formguide and not the pdf template. Thus the PDF template would only be needed to create the formguide and nothing more than that.

Finally, if I invoke a process using soap inan external application (Java or .net), is it possible to define a formguide as the first step (activity), in order to delivery the formguide as a soap response (maybe as a base64 stream), and then use it to invoke the second step of the process using that formguide (to submit the data) from the external application that received the formguide?

Thank you again

What I meant by using PIs (processing instructions) is that you would use them to identify locations in the XDP where you would place the fragment references.

For instance, say your XDP template was like this:

<xdp>
    <template>
        <subform name="rootSF">
            <?insert mainContent?>
        </subform>
    </template>
</xdp>

You could then load that into an XML DOM, find the <?insert mainContent?> PI node and replace it with your fragment reference(s):

<xdp>
    <template>
        <subform name="rootSF">
            <subform usehref="../frag/main.xdp#som($template.#subform[0].fragSF)"/>
        </subform>
    </template>
</xdp>

In this way, you wouldn’t really need to write a DOM that understood the XFA structure, provided the subform fragment reference you insert is in good order.

But if you’re considering doing this, especially on the server in an LC process, you might consider having a look at the DDX technology included in the CM Solution Accelerator’s PDK. It’s a Java library meant specifically to do dynamic server-side XFA document assembly. In fact, you might also want to check-out the Enrollment Solution Accelerator since it might contain some UI (Flex app?) that uses DDX in the back-end.

The idea is to create a new xdp file based on previous created fragments. Given the data collected from the FormGuide, we would create, step by step, the new xdp file, by adding new fragments.

I think we could, and we will, begin the process from a default template, but I dont know waht you mean by using PIs. Any example somewhere?

Thank you

What you’re describing is almost what we do for CM however we re-use the same XDP to produce the output letter. We collect data for the letter using a Form Guide (we call it the “Letter Filling Experience”) and then re-merge that data into the same XDP and serve it out as a PDF in order to generate the letter.

I don’t see why this wouldn’t be possible. Collecting data via a Form Guide is trivial, as well as getting Form Server to serve-up a new XDP as a PDF. The hard part will be generating the new XDP file since it may involve some deeper knowledge of XFA to do it properly. Of course, you could cheat by creating a template XDP file and putting some PIs in it, for example, as insertion points. Then you could just load the structure as plain XML, find the PIs and replace them with the XFA pieces you want. Or you could even use string parsing to do the replacement. In any case, you’ll want to ensure that the final product is valid XFA syntax.

Let me know how it goes!

Nice to know you are putting your hands in this kind of projects.

Actually I believe this accelerators can be a great help for adobe livecycle users. I knew about them due to some questions I made to Adobe and livecycle users in general concerning a specific goal. I would like to share this goal with you, and get your always useful opinion, if possible.

I m evaluating the possibility of dynamically create a pdf/xdp form using a process in workbench. the steps would be like this:

1 - a designer would design a pdf/xdp in designer (workbench) and then create a formguide with it. This form would be only to get the necessary answers to evaluate process conditions.

2 - a process would be designed. The first activity would be to get a formguide and answer to its questions. The output of this activity would be the xml data of the form guide/pdf source. The next activities would run depending of the data in the xml. In each activity, and depending of the data, a new pdf/xdp form would be constructed, activity by activity. At the end I would get a new xdp file.

3 - When a user invokes the process (external application), it will get the formguide, the data is submited and the process continues. A new and final xdp/pdf file will be given to this user.

Do you think this is possible to achieve? Any recomendation?

Thank you

nep