My friend John Brinkman has posted a really good list of handy form development and debugging tips. Check it out! These tips could save you a lot of time and effort. I use them all the time when I work on forms with Designer, Acrobat and LiveCycle Forms.
One other nice thing about console.println() for outputting debug information to the JavaScript Console in Acrobat is that these strings are also output to the Flash Log when you run form guides generated with LiveCycle ES Update 1 (8.2.1) using the Flash Debug Player. (The 3rd part of my MAX 2008 Tutorial series has details on how to set this up under the “Flash Log and Debug Players” section.)
Posted by Stefan Cameron on May 27th, 2009
Filed under
Acrobat,
Debugging,
Designer,
Form Guides,
Script Editor,
Tips
I am certain at some point in time you have had to fill-out some type of form on a website and the required fields were identified by an asterisk (*). This is a common way to communicate to a user which fields are mandatory and which ones aren’t.
This is a design pattern that the Form Guide Team adopted when they conceived the default Form Guide user experience. Since the appearance of a field in a form guide doesn’t have to be the same as that of the field in the form (PDF), they were able to automatically add an asterisk next to mandatory fields without affecting their PDF counterparts.
Continue reading…
Posted by Stefan Cameron on March 16th, 2009
Filed under
Acrobat,
Form Guides,
Scripting,
Tutorials
Check this out: My colleague Trevor Ward, developer on the Form Guide Team, has just posted a very cool sample of an AIR app running a Form Guide complete with data and an embedded PDF on the LiveCycle Form Guide blog. Please keep in mind that it’s just a proof-of-concept but it should give you enough to go on to build your own solution if you’ve been wondering if/how this could be done.
Posted by Stefan Cameron on February 26th, 2009
Filed under
Form Guides
Welcome to the third and final part of a three-part post series tutorial on importing data into a form guide and a PDF. The first part covered the form design, the second part covered the Flex code and the third part will cover designing and debugging the form guide that will complete the solution.
Form Guide Layout
The goal is to design a form guide which will provide two panels: one for user options and the other for results.
The first panel will expose the 4 fields inside the GuideObjects subform (which are only meant to be exposed in the form guide — hence why the GuideObjects subform has the Initialize script to hide it if the host isn’t “Flash”). The user will have the option to choose an actor and/or category for further filtering and will then click on the GetMovies button to execute the request on the Movie Service. When the requested XML is returned to the form guide, the GetMovies result handler will convert the XML into instances of MovieRow inside the Listing table.
The second panel will use a repeater layout to expose the Listing table’s contents within the form guide however this panel will only be accessible if the movie query returned 1 or more results.
Once the results are in, the user will then be able to switch (“flip”) to the PDF view which will show the Listing table in the form, from which the user could then print or archive the results.
Continue reading…
Posted by Stefan Cameron on November 19th, 2008
Filed under
Acrobat,
Bugs,
Conferences,
Debugging,
Form Guides,
Scripting,
Tables,
Tutorials
Welcome to the second in a three-part post series on importing data into a form guide (and, by extension, a PDF form). In the first part, we designed the XFA form that will provide us with the print/archive view of the movies retrieved from the Movie Service. The second part will focus on the special Flex code we will need to include in the form which will ultimately be executed by Flash when it runs in the form guide which we’ll design in part 3.
Flex Code in XFA Forms
The key to today’s tutorial is understanding when and where the script you write in an XFA form (JavaScript or FormCalc) is compiled or interpreted.
Continue reading…
Posted by Stefan Cameron on November 18th, 2008
Filed under
Conferences,
Designer,
Form Guides,
Instance Manager,
Scripting,
Tables,
Tutorials,
XFA
