Stefan Cameron on Forms
Building intelligent forms using Adobe LiveCycle Designer

Data Services

This page contains a listing of all the data services used in my tutorials. During the form development process, I often find I need some type of data service to test with and I can never find good ones (or the ones I once used are no longer available). These services are therefore meant to aid in development, testing and samples.

Movies XML Service

A simple XML service that provides information about movies (useful with HTTPService class in Flex/ActionScript when designing Form Guides).

Featured in the following tutorials:

HTTP Submit Test Service

A simple web page that displays data submitted to it in various formats (XML, XDP, PDF, URL-encoded). Use this to test HTTP submissions from XFA forms.

Featured in the following tutorials:

Posted by Stefan Cameron on July 15th, 2009
Both comments and pings are currently closed.

8 Responses to “Data Services”

  1. qais on December 18th, 2009

    Hi Sir
    I Need Help For DataBase Access With One Table
    How Can I Add Button And A Script To Add New Record In Table
    Please Help Me

    Thanks

  2. Stefan Cameron on December 18th, 2009

    qais,

    See my tutorial on connecting to a database.

  3. Billy on January 26th, 2010

    Hi Stef,

    Your site has a ton of useful information and I am just beginning to develop forms using LifeCycle. My goal is to be able to take a PDF form and use it to submit to a database that is available online. Given what I know so far, it seems like HTTP Post is the way I want to go because I know enough about scripting languages to develop a page to handle it. However, I have ran into issues with Adobe throwing an error when I try to submit because it doesnt know how to handle the HTML that is returning to Reader.

    Then I came across your dataservice example and it works so well — basically presenting a confirmation PDF in return. How did you do that and are there any samples/examples of the code that you can point me to that will help me write a similar service for my own web server.

    Thanks for all the great info,
    Billy from VA

  4. Stefan Cameron on February 8th, 2010

    Billy,

    I have ran into issues with Adobe throwing an error when I try to submit because it doesnt know how to handle the HTML that is returning to Reader.

    This is due to the fact that Reader cannot create PDF files. When it gets an HTML response, it can’t open it. If using Acrobat, which can create PDFs from HTML, it would auto-convert the HTML response into a new PDF and display it.

    basically presenting a confirmation PDF in return

    In this case, you must be submitting the form as a PDF from Acrobat (or the PDF is extended to allow Reader to submit PDF).

    I don’t want to divulge all my secrets but I will say that when the PDF is submitted to the service, the service looks at the content type and handles the case where it’s “application/pdf”, resulting in the browser loading the PDF in the Acrobat/Reader plug-in.

  5. Moroni on November 8th, 2010

    I am a newbie to this but my question is do you have an example of how to take a pdf form from adobe design and link it to an access database to the user can hit send and it loads the xml data into the database?

    Thanks

  6. Stefan Cameron on November 15th, 2010

    @Moroni,

    Please see my tutorial on connecting a form to a database. While it doesn’t use an Access database, the concept is the same: You’ll need an ODBC connection to your Access database and then you’ll connect your form to the ODBC connection.

  7. Leena Jain on January 19th, 2012

    Hi Stefan,

    I am trying to submit a pdf to a dot net service.

    If possible kindly share the code for your service.I want to save the form as pdf at the server side.I am using Submit as PDF but how do i capture that PDF response at dot net (aspx) server side.

    Thanks and Regards,
    Leena Jain

  8. Stefan Cameron on January 19th, 2012

    @Leena Jain,

    My submit service is written in PHP and I don’t know the equivalent syntax for ASP but here’s the code that detects if the posted data is a PDF and simply returns it as the content of the page to the browser (as the response to the POST):

    if ($contentType == "application/pdf") {
    header("Content-type: application/pdf");
    print(file_get_contents("php://input", FILE_BINARY));
}

    Returning the PDF as the response (i.e. content of the page) will trigger the browser to open the PDF in the Acrobat plugin.

    Perhaps there’s something similar in ASP. Good luck!

    (I thought comments were closed on my blog pages but it looks like the latest WordPress update re-opened them. I am re-closing comments after I post this response.)