Last February, I announced the release of a new Designer book titled, “PDF Forms Using Acrobat and LiveCycle Designer Bible”.
Over the past few months, I had the opportunity to review it and I thought I would share my comments, with respect to the second-half of the book, which deals with LiveCycle Designer ES and XFA forms, to help you decide if it would be a good book for you*. (The first-half deals with authoring PDF forms, a.k.a. AcroForms, in Acrobat and is beyond the scope of my blog.)
Pros:
- explains the licensing agreement involved when enabling forms for Reader using Acrobat’s “Extend Features in Adobe Reader” feature (p. 268) — this is a frequently-used feature however its governing licensing agreement, seldom understood, is explained here in “plain English”;
- presents and reasons through different design approaches for a particular solution, helping the reader make an informed decision on the best course of action;
- anything and everything you could possibly want to know is dealt with in some way;
- lots of important, time-saving insights in the inline ‘notes’;
- something for everyone from beginner to advanced;
- many cross-references between various topics, making it very easy to start in any chapter and still find all the information you need.
Caution:
- risk of “information overload” — use this book as reference since it’s not a light read, though their goal is simply to present a myriad of options and let you pick the one that best suits your needs.
Overview of Topics Covered:
- all about tables (from simple layouts to advanced);
- data merging with bindings;
- Designer user interface details and lots of tips and tricks for accelerating form layout tasks;
- working with static forms (with PDF backgrounds) and dynamic forms, highlighting the differences;
- great details on all sorts of pagination options;
- lots of detail on JavaScript and FormCalc, good scripting exercises with explanations, debugging tips, table with JavaScript and equivalent FormCalc functions to make it easy to script in either language if the other is more familiar to you;
- form deployment options;
- when and how to use data connections in your forms (XML, schema, database, web service) and setting data bindings;
- great overview of LiveCycle ES, its components (e.g. LC Forms, LC Reader Extensions, LC Rights Management, LC Content Services, etc.) and what they do.
This book is available now on Amazon.com and Wiley.com and elsewhere.
* Please note that these opinions are not necessarily those of Adobe Systems Incorporated.
Posted by Stefan Cameron on November 13th, 2009
Filed under
Acrobat,
Books,
Data Binding,
Designer,
Instance Manager,
Scripting,
Tables,
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).
Continue reading…
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.
Continue reading…
Posted by Stefan Cameron on August 28th, 2009
Filed under
Data Binding,
Designer,
Scripting,
Tutorials,
XFA
In previous tutorials, I have shown how to connect an XFA form to a database and a web service. Next on the list is the XML Schema (XSD).
If you work in an enterprise setting, chances are you may have already had to deal with corporate data schemas that define how that data is structured. The goal, when connecting a form to a schema, is to ensure that the data consumed and output by the form adheres to a specific structure. Any fields bound to data nodes that aren’t inside the schema space are basically ignored at time of submission.
Continue reading…
Posted by Stefan Cameron on August 3rd, 2009
Filed under
Data Binding,
Designer,
FormCalc,
Instance Manager,
Tutorials,
XFA
Well, I’m not out for coffee for an entire month but I will be away on vacation starting today, returning July 6, 2009. I will not be posting during that time period but I will try my best to keep-up with comments though it will not be my first priority…
In the mean time, if you feel like a coffee break, you should check-out the new Adobe LiveCycle Café: It’s a really cool AIR app by Adobe that integrates all sorts of LiveCycle-related resources into one convenient dashboard. It even lets you tag content for offline use and store personal notes, online or offline.
You get a really nice News page:
A view of all LiveCycle-related blogs (showing mine in the image below):
(There’s even a tab that lets you switch between “Post Summary” and “Site” to see the article via the feed or the actual web page.)
Another really nice feature is the ability to search in one location across all Adobe LiveCycle resources. For instance, I searched for “assignNode” (a function to create data nodes in the Data DOM) and actually got a hit right in a LiveCycle reference document — very handy!
Enjoy the coffee!
Posted by Stefan Cameron on June 5th, 2009
Filed under
Acrobat,
Designer,
General,
LiveCycle,
XFA
