Target Version is a feature introduced in LiveCycle Designer 8.1 which alerts you to incompatibilities with various versions of Acrobat/Reader in your forms.

Whenever new versions of Acrobat and XFA are released, they introduce new features that previous versions don’t support. For example, the signature field’s “lock after signing” feature is only available as of Acrobat/Reader 8.0 and the hyperlink feature is only supported as of Acrobat/Reader 9.0. There are many other features that have similar version restrictions but how are you supposed to figure it out? When you’re designing your form, how can you be certain that your customers still using Reader 7.0.5 will be able to use it as you intended them to when you’re designing your form using the latest and greatest combination of Designer 8.2 and Acrobat 9.0?

That’s where Target Version becomes indispensable: By setting the “File > Form Properties > Defaults > Target Version” property to the version of Acrobat/Reader you want to target, you enable Designer to warn you when you use a feature that isn’t supported in that version. So if you target Acrobat/Reader 7.0.5 and you try to use hyperlinks, you’ll get a warning indicating that Acrobat/Reader 9.0+ is required to use hyperlinks.

To put this into perspective, Alex Kalaidjian, a developer on the LiveCycle Designer Team, has produced a short video tutorial demonstrating the usefulness of the Target Version feature.

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Posted by Stefan Cameron on October 28th, 2008
Filed under Acrobat,Designer,Tutorials,XFA
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