Stefan Cameron on Forms
Building intelligent forms using Adobe LiveCycle Designer

New Scripting Basics Guide

I was looking around in the LiveCycle Developer Center today and came across a great beginner’s guide to scripting in Designer that Alex Mitchell, a colleague of mine here at Adobe, recently posted to the site.

Even though it’s labelled as "beginner", there’s some great stuff in there regardless of your level of expertise. For example, there are some really nice flow charts illustrating the order of execution of form and field events and the section on Creating and Resuing JavaScript Functions should come-in handy for those complex forms. There are also some examples of common scripting tasks which could be useful in all types of forms.

Posted by Stefan Cameron on January 4th, 2007
Filed under Scripting
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4 Responses to “New Scripting Basics Guide”

  1. Khader Meeran on March 2nd, 2007

    This is to inform you that I am new to Acrobat LiveCycle Designer. It is a pretty impressive tool for designing/preparing forms. I would like to know about the scripting that Acrobat supports as the javascript used in the same is different from the conventional one.

  2. Joseph Moffatt on March 5th, 2007

    Hi, thanks for the great blog. I’m also new to LiveCycle Designer. I have a question regarding the “Hiding and showing objects” example. When one of the text fields is “hidden”, it is removed from the layout and subform1 shifts. So why, when subform1 is “hidden”, doesn’t subform2 shift? Is it possible to apply this effect or are subforms fixed within the document?

  3. Stefan Cameron on March 10th, 2007

    Khader,

    Acrobat supports Adobe’s ExtendScript — an extension to JavaScript.

    The JavaScript for Acrobat page of the Acrobat Developer Center contains JavaScript Acrobat API References for versions of Acrobat from 5.0 and later.

  4. Stefan Cameron on March 12th, 2007

    Joseph,

    The difference between hiding the text field and hiding subform1 is that the text field is contained within Subform1 which has flowed content whereas subform1 itself is contained with the page subform which has positioned content.

    When the text field is hidden, it no longer affects the layout and therefore all the fields below it inside Subform1 shift up and Subform1’s height decreases.

    When Subform1 is hidden, it simply disappears from layout however none of its other sibling objects (like Subform2 and a bunch of text objects) move because they’re positioned at specific locations within the page subform.

    You can use the Content property on the Object palette’s Subform tab to dictate whether a subform’s content is flowed or positioned.