Logica’s Form-O-Matic is a solution which:
- is smart, because it provides a fast way of developing interactive forms which decrease the likelihood of errors and reduce costs.
- is uniforn, fast and controllable. This is thanks to a unique development method based on the inputting of standard parameters. Doing so the development time is reduced by more than 50%.
- is simple and optimised. Form-O-Matic can be adapted very rapidly to your organisation’s requirements, for example in terms of the house style and design of the form and the naming of each parameter.
- provides simple error detection. By using the debug mode in Form-O-Matic, a single parameter enables all dynamic actions to be displayed in text on a separate screen.

We have seen Form-O-Matic in action, and it can shorten the lead time for development of Interactive Forms, and provide error detection. It reduces the aftercare of the Form, and it is quickly to implement, and easy to use and maintain.

See also the following factsheet about Logica’s Form-O-Matic.

For more information you can reply on this post, or contact Logica directly through erp.nl@logica.com

Prescription:
To achieve this follow these steps:
1) First of all the authentication certificate must be known/registered/uploaded to the LiveCycle server. Open the adminui –> Settings –> Trust Store Management –> Certificates.
When importing the .cer file, specify that you want to trust the certificate for “Certificate Authentication”, and provide an alias.

2) Next this certificate must be mapped to an existing user in LiveCycle.
Open the adminui –> Settings –> User Management –> Configuration –> Certificate mapping.
The mapping between a certificate and a user is done for a defined alias, and is accomplished by mapping a certificate attribute (Mail, CN, DN,… ) to a user property (Full Name, Given Name, Mail, login ID, …).

In the case of the Belgian eid card the CN on the authentication certificate contains also the word “Authentication”. In my case my CN = Peter Schellemans (Authentication). So in order to get a working certificate mapping towards an existing user, make sure you have a user with a similar Full Name. In my case I have a user (adminui –> Settings –> User Management –> Users and Groups) with First Name = Peter, Last Name = Schellemans (Authentication).

3) Next add this user as part of your Policy. When opening the policy protected document you will now get the choice between userid/password authentication and client certificate authentication.

Tip to stay healthy:
If you want a higher level of security when authenticating towards a policy protected document, Adobe LiveCycle allows you to map certificates towards users, used in a policy definition.

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.

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.