Dr Flex & Dr LiveCycle » Bart Vossen

Change the GDS (Global Document Storage) location of a Production LiveCycle ES System

Bart Vossen — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 11:11:20 +0000

Important Remark:

Within the LiveCycle Documentation you will find the following on the GDS:

“The global document storage (GDS) is a directory used to store long-lived files such as PDF files used within a process or DSC deployment archives. Long-lived files are a critical part of the overall state of the LiveCycle ES environment. If some or all long-lived documents are lost or corrupted, the LiveCycle ES server may become unstable. Input documents for asynchronous job invocation are also stored in the GDS and must be available in order to process requests. Therefore, it is important that the GDS is stored on the redundant array of independent disks (RAID) and backed up regularly.”

So the GDS is the cornerstone of a LiveCycle system. Changing this location should be carefully executed by product experts. Take a back-up before you start and don’t try this at home …

Disease:

For whatever reason you want to change the location of the GDS. As explained above this is possible but should be very carefully executed.

Prescription:

Disclaimer: This section will describe the different steps to execute in order to move the location of the GDS. These steps should be considered as a Guideline and not as a by Adobe Supported set of actions. You are encouraged to execute this first in a Test environment before doing this in a Production environment. The different Steps are:

Alert and Ask the End-Users to get out of the LiveCycle Application/Server
Put the LiveCycle Application/Server in ‘Operate in safe backup mode’. In Adminui go to Settings > Core System > Backup Settings – select the ‘Operate in safe backup mode’ and hit the OK button.
Backup the GDS folder
Zip or Tar the GDS folder
Change the location of the GDS folder. In Adminui go to Settings > Core System > Core Configurations and change the location of the GDS Directory. Hit the OK button; you will get a second page and hit the OK button again
Shutdown the LiveCycle Application/Server
Check whether the LiveCycle Application/Server system user has access to the new GDS folder
UnZip or UnTar the files in the new GDS folder
StartUp the LiveCycle Application/Server
Do some basic validations. In Adminui go to Services > Applications and Services and choose Archive Management and Endpoint Management and check visually whether you get the expected information
Deactivate the ‘Operate in safe backup mode’. In Adminui go to Settings > Core System > Backup Settings – unselect the ‘Operate in safe backup mode’ and hit the OK button

Tip to stay healthy:
Make sure that you have the final location of the GDS available, before you install LiveCycle in a Production environment.

How to ‘switch off’ mandatory fields when the subform they belong to becomes invisible

Bart Vossen — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 14:11:02 +0000

Disease:

Putting objects ‘visible/invisble’ is a great feature to guide end-users to fill-out forms in an easy way. However, when putting a subform, which contains mandatory fields to invisible, the mandatory fields still remain mandatory. This can off course be solved by putting all mandatory fields to ‘non-mandatory’ through scripting but can become a development nightmare.

Prescription:

The idea is to have a general procedure which would specify for each subform which fields are mandatory. We will define an array inside the form which will contain a list of mandatory fields for each subform. Secondly, a procedure is built which will loop through this array for the given subform and will put the fields to mandatory/non-mandatory depending on the fact whether the subform has been set to visible/invisble.

A sample form can be found here.

Tips to stay healthy:

When analyzing your forms take in consideration how objects will be grouped and which fields are mandatory within a group. This makes it afterwards easy to introduce these fields/subforms in the array.

Multi-Lingual Forms: XLIFF support in LiveCycle Designer 8.2

Bart Vossen — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 16:02:46 +0000

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.