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.)

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

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.

Thanks

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.

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

See my tutorial on connecting to a database.

Thanks