Paul Guerette, a colleague of mine at Adobe, will be giving a “tech talk” eSeminar on connecting forms to databases over at AcrobatUsers.com on Tuesday, March 23, 2010, at 10am PST (1pm EST).
If you have been struggling with connecting a form to a database, are wanting to know what the best practices and/or security concerns are, or have some specific questions you would like to ask, I highly recommend you attend the session. It’s free to attend (and free to become a member in order to attend)!
I’ll be answering chat questions “live” as the session unfolds. I hope you can join us!
Posted by Stefan Cameron on March 10th, 2010
Filed under
Acrobat,
Data Binding,
Designer,
Scripting,
Tutorials,
XFA
I thought I would point-out a nice improvement that was made to XFA <subform> elements back in XFA 2.8: The addition of the access property.
In days of yore, if you wanted to disable all fields and exclusion groups (for the sake of brevity, I’ll refer to these collectively as “fields” in this article) in a particular section of your form, you would’ve had to write a script that recursively drilled down into all children of that section looking for fields to disable. This is because the access attribute only applied to fields.
With this change, assuming the section in question is contained within a subform, you can now easily disable all fields contained within it simply by setting the subform‘s access attribute to “readOnly”!
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Posted by Stefan Cameron on March 8th, 2010
Filed under
Scripting,
Tutorials,
XFA
While recently helping a few people with some issues related to HTTP submissions from XFA forms, I ended-up creating new Data Service that helps with testing HTTP Submit Buttons.
The service is quite simple: It displays what you submit to it. Since Designer’s “PDF Preview” tab is actually an instance of Internet Explorer hosting a PDF version of the form you’re previewing (a temporary PDF if your form is saved as an XDP or is new), the results are conveniently displayed within the tab itself after clicking on the submit button.
To use the service, simply use either an http submit button (or a regular button with its “Object palette > Field tab > Control Type property” set to “Submit”) and set its URL to:
http://forms.stefcameron.com/services/http-submit-test/
The idea is to use this service as a means to test/debug your forms before spending time writing the actual server code that will receive the data. You can also use it to ensure that you are submitting the correct data to a third-party service (for which you don’t control the server-side code).
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Posted by Stefan Cameron on December 16th, 2009
Filed under
Data Binding,
Debugging,
Tables,
Tutorials,
XFA
After spending some time, recently, showing you how to connect your form to a schema and highlighting Designer’s support for schema metadata, I thought I would round-off my current train of thought on schemas by tackling multi-selection listboxes. Since they store their selected data in <value> nodes, once you think about it, their schema definition may not be obvious. When you’re working with XML data that isn’t governed by a schema and namespaces, it is perhaps easier to work with (i.e. accept) these <value> nodes however things change when you have a schema telling you how your data must be structured and scoped (with namespaces).
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Posted by Stefan Cameron on September 30th, 2009
Filed under
Acrobat,
Bugs,
Data Binding,
Scripting,
Tutorials,
XFA
My first tutorial on XML schemas explained how to connect your form to a schema however it did not show some of the Data View palette’s special features with respect to metadata in XML schemas.
Using metadata based on a combination of the XML Schema appInfo and Dublin Core title and description elements, you can influence how the Data Connection Wizard creates fields you drag and drop from the data connection tree into your form. You can also direct the Data View palette to show some of this information in the Schema Data Connection Tree that it displays.
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Posted by Stefan Cameron on August 28th, 2009
Filed under
Data Binding,
Designer,
Scripting,
Tutorials,
XFA
