Angie Okamoto, Director of Enterprise Development at Easel Solutions, and Ted Padova, the "PDF Guru" and author of the "Adobe Acrobat PDF Bible" series, have published a new book titled, "PDF Forms Using Acrobat and LiveCycle Designer Bible". I’m sure it’ll be a great reference!

Their book is available now on Amazon.com and Wiley.com.

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Posted by Stefan Cameron on February 5th, 2009
Filed under Acrobat,Books,Data Binding,Designer,Instance Manager,Scripting,Tables,Tutorials,XFA

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I discovered something interesting the other day: Just because Designer wants you to type script for a field’s Full event doesn’t mean you have to execute script when the Full event is triggered.

The XFA 2.8 specification specifies the <event> node’s content as being one of the following nodes: <script>, <execute> (executes a web service data connection), <submit> (causes the form to be submitted via email or HTTP) or <signData> (causes the form to be signed). Only one may be specified and whatever content is there will be executed when the event is triggered.

This means that you could, for example, cause a web service to be executed whenever a repeatable subform’s index changes (i.e. whenever you add/remove instances).

Is this useful? Well, perhaps not, but I thought it was interesting! Who knows what you might think of doing with this…

The only catch to all this is that Designer only lets you enter script (JavaScript or FormCalc) into an event, thereby specifying an event’s content as <script> as opposed to <submit> or <execute>. If you want to, say, cause a form submit when a field’s Full event is triggered, you’ll have to go to the XML Source and set the event’s content to a <submit> node yourself. An easy way to do this is first to add an Email/HTTP Submit Button to the form, set the field’s Full event to a placeholder script, go to the XML Source view, find the button using the Hierarchy palette, copy its Click event <submit> node and paste it into the field’s Full event so it looks like what’s below and delete the button:

<event activity="full" name="event__full">
    <submit format="xml" textEncoding="UTF-8" target="mailto:"/>
</event>

Sample Form

Check-out my little sample form that causes the form to be submitted via email when you fill the text field at the top and where a web service data connection is executed whenever you add an instance of Subform2 using the button at the bottom (below the web service import/export fields).

Download Sample [pdf]

Sample Minimum Requirements: Designer and Acrobat Standard/Pro 8.0 (XFA 2.5)

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Posted by Stefan Cameron on January 30th, 2009
Filed under Events,Scripting,Tutorials,XFA

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XFA forms are event-driven. Pretty much every action triggers an event and in that event (e.g. Initialize, Change, Click, etc.), you always have access to an xfa.event object (see the “eventPseudoModel” topic on page 63 of the Designer 8.2 Scripting Reference) and, depending on whether your form is running in Acrobat/Reader, you will also have access to an AcroForm event object.

I have discovered that in that event isn’t quite accurate. It should rather be stated as within the context of that event. That’s because any function calls that you make from the event handler (for instance, into a script object that contains other functions — maybe your event handler simply passes execution to a re-usable event handler function that you have defined in this script object) will have access to these very useful objects.

In essence, xfa.event and event (if defined) are, for lack of a better term, contextual objects that exist — and are valid — as long as you are within the context (where context is different from usual definition of scope) of an event handler.

I had a case, just recently, where I needed to access the event.target property (that is, the AcroForm Doc object provided by Acrobat when it’s the host) in a function located inside a script object which I was calling from a subform’s Initialize event. At first, I thought I needed to pass it in as a parameter:

// Subform Initialize Event handler code
utils.InitSubform(this, xfa.host.name == "Acrobat" ? event : null);

-----
utils Script Object
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function InitSubform(sf, hostEvent)
{
    ...
    if (hostEvent != null)
    {
        // access AcroForm Doc object from parameter
        var pdfDoc = hostEvent.target;
        ...
    }
    ...
}

Unfortunately, this would’ve required updates to many forms since the script object was being used as a script object fragment and many forms were already using that function with only the first parameter.

Since the event object is actually available at that point in time, given that the handler is executing in the context of the subform’s Initialize event, I didn’t have to pass it in as a parameter and so I didn’t have to update a bunch of forms:

// Subform Initialize Event handler code
utils.InitSubform(this);

-----
utils Script Object
-----

function InitSubform(sf)
{
    ...
    if (xfa.host.name == "Acrobat")
    {
        // access AcroForm Doc object from in-context event object
        var pdfDoc = event.target
        ...
    }
    ...
}

Just remember that the xfa.event and event objects are only valid for the duration of the event which was triggered (so you shouldn’t hold on to them for future use) and that the event object is only available to you if the host is Acrobat/Reader (testing for xfa.host.name == “Acrobat” works for both Acrobat and Reader).

Tested with Adobe Acrobat and Reader 9.0.

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Posted by Stefan Cameron on January 14th, 2009
Filed under AcroForm Objects,Events,Scripting

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I hope you all had a great holiday! There’s suddenly lots of activity on my blog today so I assume most of you are back at it too.

To kick things off in 2009, I thought I would start with a short but significant post on calling script object functions at a later time using Acrobat’s app.setTimeOut JavaScript API. (app.setInterval is similar but requires a little more handling, to ensure you don’t leave the timer running when the form is closed, so I won’t cover that here. Check-out this sample if you’re curious.)

I had long thought this wasn’t possible but recently discovered that it was, while helping-out one of my readers, in Acrobat/Reader 9.

Theory

The app.setTimeOut API requires that the first parameter be a string which is the script to be evaluated and executed when the timer expires. The second parameter is the number of milliseconds the host application (Acrobat) should wait before interpreting the script in the context of the document which set the timer. This means that the “this” object is an AcroForm Doc object.

Given that an AcroForm Doc object has an xfa property (“defined only if the document is an XML form, that is, if the document was created in LiveCycle Designer“) which is “the root node of the underlying XFA model,” it follows that you can access properties of the XFA form contained within the PDF document from the AcroForm API. After all, that’s how I managed to get invalid fields to flash red in a previous sample.

By the way, if you’re writing AcroForm scripts and you want to verify whether the current document is an XFA-PDF (a PDF that contains an XFA form) or just a straight PDF document, you can simply test for (typeof pdfDoc.xfa == “undefined”). If it’s true, it means you just have a plain PDF.

When you put all of this together, it follows that you can effectively execute a script object function “later” as long as you address it properly using normal SOM expression rules. Since script objects are loaded into the Form DOM at runtime, you can access them via the xfa.form property. Once you’ve accessed the Form DOM, the first object you’ll need to reference is your root subform (the object at the very top of the tree, usually named “form1”, in Designer’s Hierarchy palette) and from there, your script object.

Note that the AcroForm app object is only available when the host application running the PDF is Acrobat/Reader so this won’t work if you render your form as HTML using LiveCycle Forms ES, for example.

Sample

If you had a function foo() in a script object “MyScripts” defined on the root subform “form1”, you would access it like this:

xfa.form.form1.MyScripts.foo();

If you didn’t know (or didn’t want to know) the name of the root subform ahead of time (say this function is accessed from a fragment which is used in many different forms), you could refer to it like this:

xfa.form.resolveNode("#subform[0]").MyScripts.foo();

Finally, to call it 1 second later, you would simply do this:

app.setTimeOut('xfa.form.resolveNode("#subform[0]").MyScripts.foo();', 1000);

Minimum Requirements: I’ve only tried this with Acrobat/Reader 9 however the JavaScript for Acrobat 9 Reference claims that the xfa property is available since Acrobat/Reader 6.0.2. I’ll leave it up to you to try it out in previous versions. Please report back if you find that it works prior to Acrobat/Reader 9.

Updated: January 5, 2009

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Posted by Stefan Cameron on January 5th, 2009
Filed under AcroForm Objects,Scripting

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For those of you still waiting for a PDF version of the JavaScript for Acrobat 9 API documentation, I have some unfortunate news: I have learned that there will be no PDF version issued. The only documentation available will be the LiveDocs version which I reported on earlier.

I think that’s really unfortunate since PDFs (and CHMs) tend to be faster (no need to wait for page loads every time you select a topic), better indexed, easier to search and available offline. What’s your preference?

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Posted by Stefan Cameron on December 8th, 2008
Filed under Acrobat,AcroForm Objects,Scripting

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