Dr Flex & Dr LiveCycle

Disease:

If you have upgraded to LiveCycle ES from a previous version of PDF Generator or even Adobe Elements Server, you may have noticed that the Web UI for generating PDF files is only accessible for those that have a login to the server, and for those that have the proper rights to use the PDF Generator services. In the past there was a URL where everybody could go to server-based PDF Generation.

Prescription:

Of course you could start to develop your own web-page to offer this service to anybody within your company, but actually there is a documented solution for this. In the LiveCycle ES LiveDocs on our website, there is a topic called “Quick Start: Converting a Microsoft Word document to a PDF document using LiveCycle Remoting“. This specific sample uses LiveCycle Remoting to call the standard PDF Conversion process that is part of LC ES. Click here to access the page that contains the code needed.

Tips to stay healthy:

If you take the code described above, and open it using Adobe Flex, you can create a SWF file there that you can post on a web server. The result looks like this:

It will take you 30 minutes to do the whole process, and you will have a working process. Make sure you link to the swc files in the LiveCycle ES SDK (located in C:\Adobe\LiveCycle8\LiveCycle_ES_SDK\misc\DataServices\Client-Libraries) when compiling the application.

Disease:
When signing a pdf document in Acrobat/Reader on Vista using the Belgian eid card, it is possible that the signing process is interrupted, and that the Acrobat/Reader gets closed.

Prescription:
The actual cause of this problem is not at all related to the Acrobat/Reader software installed.
Vista uses DEP (Data Execution Protection) which, in combination with the current Belgian eid middleware 2.6, causes the signing process to stop. Also Acrobat/Reader is then stopped.

A workaround is to disable the DEP mechanism. This can be done following
http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/120778-dep-enable-disable.html

A new version of the Belgian eid card middleware has been tested and works well on Vista (with DEP enabled). This version will be made available on http://eid.belgium.be probably in fall 2008.

Tip to stay healthy:
In the mean time testing other middleware can help as well to see if this works. The quickest workaround is to disable DEP, and upgrade to the new Belgian eid card middleware as soon as it becomes available.

There’s lots of new opportunities for developers now Adobe has integrated Alfresco into the LiveCycle Enterprise Suite:

Alfresco Software today announced a new technology partnership with Adobe Systems Incorporated to provide additional content services capabilities to Adobe® LiveCycle™ Enterprise Suite (ES). Under the terms of the agreement, Adobe will embed the Alfresco Enterprise Content Management (ECM) software into Adobe LiveCycle ES. The relationship represents a shared vision for a new class of applications that utilize flexible, open source and Web 2.0 standards that deliver rich and engaging enterprise experiences.

Adobe has integrated a big part of the Alfresco stack – which delivers tons of features on it’s own – and improved things big time, including more platform support and obviously deep integration with a ton of LiveCycle services.

LiveCycle ES Update 1 introduces LiveCycle Content Services ES, a fully integrated set of content services, ranging from an enterprise content repository to social collaboration tools such as enterprise forums. LiveCycle Content Services ES is now part of the base LiveCycle ES platform providing features such as check-in/check-out, versioning, auditing, archiving/retention and access rights management

You can find more information about content services here and read more about what’s new in LiveCycle Updater 1.

Wanna try the new features? Join the LiveCycle ES Update 1 Prerelease Program and provide feedback into the development process by registering here.

For more information:

• Alfresco announcing the Adobe partnership
• Adobe point of view on the Alfresco integration
• What’s new in LiveCycle Updater 1
• Planning your upgrade to LiveCycle ES Update 1
• Join the LiveCycle Update 1 beta

Disease:

Developing multi-lingual forms can be time-consuming and difficult to implement. 

Prescription: 

LiveCycle Designer 8.2, currently in beta, offers XLIFF support.  The generic idea is to extract field labels, hints, etc. from the xdp-template and store these in a xml-file. Translate the labels in the xml-file. Merge the original template with the xml-file to create a new xdp-template which will contain the translated  ‘labels’. These are the different steps:

1) You need to create a DWORD key ‘EmbedTranslationAttributes’ equal to 1 in the windows registry in order to include the XLIFF definitions in your xdp template. Under HKEY_CURRENT_USER – Software – Adobe – Designer – 8.2 – Options   

2) Develop/save your template (e.g. xliff.xdp)  

3) Install an xslt parser (I used the Saxon xslt parser)

4) Execute the following command to export the ‘labels’ (field labels, hints, error messages, etc.) out of the xdp

java net.sf.saxon.Transform -s:xliff.xdp -xsl:XDPtoS2X.xslt -o:strings.xml

5) Change the labels in the strings.xml file

6) Execute the following command to import the ‘labels’ in the newly created xdp (e.g. new.xdp)

java net.sf.saxon.Transform -s:strings.xml -xsl:S2XtoXDP.xslt -o:new.xdp

Please be noted that in the S2XtoXDP.xslt the input-XDP (e.g. xliff.xdp) is hard-coded in the sample; You may change the name of the xdp at line 24 in the xslt-file. 

That’s it.

Tip to stay healthy: 

Thanks to the support of Dr. Steve and Dr. Marc, I have created a zip-file which contains the xslt’s, command-file’s and the sample xliff.xdp. Download the package here. Get familiar with this new feature and develop multi-lingual forms more rapidly.

Adobe Benelux Sales Engineers will be sharing more and more of their knowledge publicly this year. Next to the DrLivecycle initiatives, we’ll also be hosting some LiveCycle Up2Date seminars which provide more background information on specific Adobe LiveCycle ES modules.

This Thursday (Netherlands) and next week (Belgium) we’ll be hosting the first seminar, this one is on Document Security. From the site:

Document control and digital signatures protect electronic documents

The Adobe suite of security solutions delivers document control and digital signature services that simplify the process of protecting sensitive electronic documents and forms. Organizations can easily integrate Adobe document security solutions into current business processes and enterprise infrastructure to support a wide range of simple and complex processes. Adobe solutions dynamically protect electronic documents inside and outside the network, online and offline to provide persistent, end-to-end protection throughout an electronic document’s lifecycle.

June 12th 2008, Adobe Offices, Amsterdam
Agenda:
10h-11h: Presentation by an Adobe Systems Engineer
11h-12h: Adobe forms within the financial world, Tim Binsted, Atos Origin

June 19th 2008, Adobe Offices, Diegem
Agenda:
10h-11h: Presentation by an Adobe Systems Engineer
11h-12h: How to use e-ID and Adobe Reader and PDF technology to electronically sign
documents in a web based application? Hugues Dorchy, The e-ID Company

Register for the event at the Adobe Up2date seminars page.

Disease:

How to dynamically populate a dropdown list in a pdf form with results from a webservice? Typically one can accomplish this by using lots of hidden fields to capture the webservice results, and write multiple lines of Javascript code to populate the dropdown list based on the values of these hidden fields. There is however a much shorter way!

Prescription:

LiveCycle Designer 8 offers a nice new functionality.

1) Select the dropdown list and go to the Object Palette.

2) There select the right most icon.

3) Since version 8 one can choose “Show Dynamic Properties”. The result of this is that “Caption” and “List Items” become links instead of just labels.

4) Choose “List Items” and bind the dropdown list items to the return value of the webservice (through the webservice dataconnection).

This is it.

One can go a step further. Suppose you want to select a value from this dropdown list, which needs to be used as input for a second webservice, which needs to populate on its turn a second dropdown list. The same applies for the second dropdown list.

1) Bind it dynamically to the result of the second webservice.

2) Make sure however that in this case you use execute(0) when writing the Javascript code to call the second webservice, and not execute(1). Execute(0) will make sure that the DOM is not remerged (with the risk that the first dropdown list gets empty again)

Tip to stay healthy:

Start questioning your code when you see your lines of code and your amount of hidden fields growing just to accomplish an easy population of lists. Chances are big that Designer offers a functionality to do this on the fly.

Disease:

What if you would like to present your customers with a more graphical view on tabular data, and generate documents that include pie-charts, bar-charts, etcetera.

Prescription:

LiveCycle ES offers various ways to include charts in the generated forms & documents. This time I would like to highlight one alternative in particular. You can make use of Google Chart to call for the right charts. Google Chart makes use of a REST API. It’s a bit like a webservice, but uses simple URL’s to call remote functionality. If you use LiveCycle Designer ES, you can build the right URL and call the Google Service from for instance an initialize event within the page. When the document is rendered, the resulting image is automatically included in your result. A very simple example of a URL for Google Chart is http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=p3&chd=t:60,40&chs=250x100&chl=Hello|World

Now it is also possible include charts such as the one below in your template design.

A full sample including the chart above can be downloaded here.

Tip to stay healthy:

I have created a sample for you that you can use yourself. The sample is also used for another post regarding organizing XML data in multiple columns, but since this is good data, a chart is right in context there. Download the package (including an xdp and 2 sample xml files) here. This works stand-alone, but also when using the Output service in your LiveCycle Workbench ES. Please send me your results when you create some exciting charts in your templates.

Disease:

Let’s say you are a financial organization and you want to inform your customers about the value of their investment over the next 20 or 30 years in a simple one-page overview. When dealing with XML data the Table assistant is often used to make sure that the data rows are displayed in a nice manner. However, when you are dealing with 20 or 30 rows, the table grows bigger, and uses multiple pages. Here is an example of XML data that you might want to display in a consolidated way.

Prescription:

Besides the Table assistant to organize your XML data rows in a nice matter, Adobe LiveCycle Designer offers other features to handle this kind of data, and display it in a different way. Within the Object Library there is an object called “Content Area”, that offers a lot of flexibity to handle the challenge described above. The result of using Content Area’s look like this:

A sample document of the result can be downloaded here.

Tip to stay healthy:

I have created a template where I have used the technique above to populate 3 columns with data from an XML file. I have prepared a document package that is downloadable that includes the following documents:

• LiveCycle Designer template (You need LiveCycle Designer 8.x)
• 2 XML sample files you can use for previewing (So you can see the different behaviour of the form)