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

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

You looked at other form examples and learned that you can use scripts like form.subform.instanceManager.addInstance() to create new instances of subforms on the page. However, when you Preview the form the new instance is not added to the page.

Prescription:
The most common mistake – I’ve been there myself – is that newbies forget to save the form as an Adobe Dynamic XML Form.

Tip to stay healthy:
There is a good collection of form samples available from the Adobe LiveCycle Designer Help menu. They are all located in the LiveCycle Designer ES installation folder in the directory \EN\Samples\. Once you get more into scripting your forms you definitely should also check the LiveCycle Designer Scripting Samples that are available at www.adobe.com/devnet/livecycle/designer_scripting_samples.html.