Stefan Cameron on Forms
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New LiveCycle Enterprise Cafe Knowledge Application

There is a new version of Adobe LiveCycle Café, renamed Adobe Enterprise Café, available for download. The new version lets you “aggregate content related to Adobe LiveCycle ES (Enterprise Suite), Acrobat, Connect, ColdFusion, and the Adobe Flash Platform in a timely and customized fashion.”

If you haven’t tried this out yet, it’s a great knowledge tool that lets you search across the entire Adobe Developer Community and Adobe DevNet resources, as well as get news updates, feeds, online training, events, etc., all in a single Adobe AIR application. You can even chat with other Adobe Developers who are online.


Posted by Stefan Cameron on June 10th, 2010
Filed under Acrobat,Designer,LiveCycle

Show the List of a Drop Down List

Did you know that the list portion of a drop down list field can be displayed programmatically? You can set focus to the field and force its drop list to be displayed all in a single API call:

xfa.host.openList(@object)
xfa.host.openList(@string) -- deprecated since XFA 2.6

where @object is a reference to the drop down list field and @string is the SOM expression of the drop down list field.

xfa.host.openList(myDropDownList); // set focus/show the drop list

The second form of the API has been deprecated since XFA 2.6 which means that since Designer 8.1, it is preferred to use the first form which takes a reference to the field rather than its SOM expression.

If you’re using Designer 8.0 or earlier, you can get the SOM expression of any field by using its somExpression property:

xfa.host.openList(ddlInDesigner71.somExpression)

This works in both JavaScript and FormCalc with the same syntax.

Now if only there was a way to programmatically show the drop calendar of a date/time field…


Posted by Stefan Cameron on May 31st, 2010
Filed under Scripting,Tips,Tutorials,XFA

Border and Margins in Flowed Layouts

My friends at Avoka have posted a very useful tutorial on the unexpected behavior of borders in flowed layouts and how to use margins to fix it. Check it out!


Posted by Stefan Cameron on April 21st, 2010
Filed under Tutorials,XFA

Post Frequency Change

Just a quick note to make you aware that while I may not be posting very frequently for the time being, I am still actively responding to your questions via comments.

Excerpts of the 10 most recent comments are now conveniently located directly on the home page, in case you want to see the latest activity.


Posted by Stefan Cameron on March 18th, 2010
Filed under General

Acrobat JavaScript Debugger on XFA Forms

Many of you have been requesting some debugging features for XFA Forms (and I’m sure many more of you just haven’t voted for it yet). It so happens that Acrobat Pro has a JavaScript Debugger which can be used — to a limited extent — with XFA Forms. See John Brinkman’s post to learn more about it — thanks John!

As he puts it, there are limitations, the biggest ones of them being, in my opinion, the inability to debug script objects and the inability to retain breakpoints between debugging sessions. Nonetheless, this tool can give you way more insight than the good old “JavaScript Console + saveXML(‘pretty’)” combination can in certain cases, and it does it in a nice tree to boot!


Posted by Stefan Cameron on March 12th, 2010
Filed under Acrobat,Debugging,Scripting,Tutorials,XFA