Let me put it simply: I got burned by using a particular syntax to check the existence of a field inside a subform object due to form compatibility settings in LiveCycle Designer 8.2.

What?

It started with a form I had created using Designer 8.1 which was set to target Acrobat 8.1/XFA 2.6. Later-on, I installed Designer 8.2 and wanted to update my form to target Acrobat 9/XFA 2.8.

In my form, I had a script object with various functions that used the following syntax to test the existence of a field inside a subform object which was passed-in to these functions as a parameter:

if (subformObj.someField)

The result of this was what I expected: If ‘someField’ existed inside ‘subformObj’, the IF statement would evaluate to ‘true’; if it didn’t, it would evaluate to ‘false’. According to the rules of dynamic properties in JavaScript, this was all fine and dandy.

Continue reading…

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Posted by Stefan Cameron on February 11th, 2009
Filed under Acrobat,Debugging,Designer,Scripting,XFA

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Angie Okamoto, Director of Enterprise Development at Easel Solutions, and Ted Padova, the "PDF Guru" and author of the "Adobe Acrobat PDF Bible" series, have published a new book titled, "PDF Forms Using Acrobat and LiveCycle Designer Bible". I’m sure it’ll be a great reference!

Their book is available now on Amazon.com and Wiley.com.

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Posted by Stefan Cameron on February 5th, 2009
Filed under Acrobat,Books,Data Binding,Designer,Instance Manager,Scripting,Tables,Tutorials,XFA

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As a side-note to my usual topics, Adobe’s Duane Nickull attended jFall, the Netherlands Java User Group Conference, and produced this Adobe TV episode in which he "demonstrates Adobe LiveCycle ES Workbench accessing Java APIs." It’s a nice overview of how Java is used in LiveCycle ES and how Workbench and workflows work.

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Posted by Stefan Cameron on February 3rd, 2009
Filed under General

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I discovered something interesting the other day: Just because Designer wants you to type script for a field’s Full event doesn’t mean you have to execute script when the Full event is triggered.

The XFA 2.8 specification specifies the <event> node’s content as being one of the following nodes: <script>, <execute> (executes a web service data connection), <submit> (causes the form to be submitted via email or HTTP) or <signData> (causes the form to be signed). Only one may be specified and whatever content is there will be executed when the event is triggered.

This means that you could, for example, cause a web service to be executed whenever a repeatable subform’s index changes (i.e. whenever you add/remove instances).

Is this useful? Well, perhaps not, but I thought it was interesting! Who knows what you might think of doing with this…

The only catch to all this is that Designer only lets you enter script (JavaScript or FormCalc) into an event, thereby specifying an event’s content as <script> as opposed to <submit> or <execute>. If you want to, say, cause a form submit when a field’s Full event is triggered, you’ll have to go to the XML Source and set the event’s content to a <submit> node yourself. An easy way to do this is first to add an Email/HTTP Submit Button to the form, set the field’s Full event to a placeholder script, go to the XML Source view, find the button using the Hierarchy palette, copy its Click event <submit> node and paste it into the field’s Full event so it looks like what’s below and delete the button:

<event activity="full" name="event__full">
    <submit format="xml" textEncoding="UTF-8" target="mailto:"/>
</event>

Sample Form

Check-out my little sample form that causes the form to be submitted via email when you fill the text field at the top and where a web service data connection is executed whenever you add an instance of Subform2 using the button at the bottom (below the web service import/export fields).

Download Sample [pdf]

Sample Minimum Requirements: Designer and Acrobat Standard/Pro 8.0 (XFA 2.5)

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Posted by Stefan Cameron on January 30th, 2009
Filed under Events,Scripting,Tutorials,XFA

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Did you know that the Fragment Library palette in LiveCycle Designer 8.2 now lets you edit fragment titles and descriptions, even fragment files themselves, without having to first open the files that contain them?

Prior to Designer 8.2 it was possible to see the title and description associated with a fragment by selecting the “Fragment Info” command from a fragment listed in the Fragment Library palette. This dialog, however, didn’t let you edit that metadata unless you were actually editing the file (XDP) that contained the fragment at the same time. That is, in order to edit a fragment’s title and description, you would have to edit it Designer first, then change its information.

Note that the Fragment Library palette is only available when using Designer outside of Workbench.

As of Designer 8.2, you can that directly from the Fragment Info dialog without having to open the file that contains it and you can even delete a fragment. The Fragment Library palette will even handle the case where there are multiple fragments in the same file (e.g. you have an XDP that contains a single paragraph of text translated into multiple languages, each being a fragment that can be referenced individually by a localized form) when you decide to delete an existing fragment.

Editing Title and Description

Say you have 3 fragments: Fragment_1, Fragment_2a and Fragment_2b. Fragment_1 is in fragment1.xdp and the other two are in fragment2.xdp and both files are in the same folder, “My Fragments”. They would look like this in the Fragment Library palette:

In the form that references them, they would look like this:

Without any of the fragment files being opened in Designer, you can edit the description of Fragment_2a to be “My description.” and see the new description appear immediately in the Fragment Library palette:

—Editing the description.

—New description in the Fragment Library palette after clicking “OK” in the Fragment Info dialog.

You can do the same for the title.

Deleting Fragments

Now say you wanted to delete Fragment_2b. Instead of having to open fragment2.xdp, select the Fragment_2b subform, delete it and then save your changes, you can just right-click on the “Fragment 2b” item in the Fragment Library palette and choose the “Delete Fragment” command.

You will be presented with a confirmation dialog stating that deleting the fragment will cause broken fragment references in all forms that might be using it. You can opt not to have this dialog displayed again.

If you choose to proceed, the fragment is removed from the file that contained it (fragment2.xdp in this case) and references in currently-open forms are updated:

—Result of deleting Fragment_2b when our form was still referencing it (it was replaced with a broken fragment reference).

Additionally, if there are no longer any fragments defined in the file which contained the fragment you just deleted, you’ll get another prompt asking if you would like to also delete the file that contained the fragment (which you can also opt not to be displayed in the future). If you accept, the file that contained the fragment would also be deleted. For example, if you opted to always remove the fragment and always remove an empty fragment file and deleted Fragment_1 from Fragment Library palette, the fragment and its file would be deleted instantly and all references would be updated, showing broken fragment references in its place.

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Posted by Stefan Cameron on January 26th, 2009
Filed under Designer,Form Fragments,Tutorials

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