Dr Flex & Dr LiveCycle

Very soon a connector for MS Sharepoint Server will be released. This offers bi-directional integration options to either connect to Sharepoint from a LiveCycle process, or to connect to a LiveCycle service from a Sharepoint document/folder.

I have recorded a demonstration that shows you how to store the result of a forms process in LiveCycle in a Sharepoint folder. I have used a very simple holiday request form that is filled in from the LiveCycle Workspace. After filling it in a static PDF is generated using the Output service and the result is stored into Sharepoint using one of the standard services. Check out the recording on http://www.vimeo.com/9378807

Look at these videos that demonstrate how you can use LiveCycle ES to build a process and an AIR application to publish tweets to a corporate Twitter account where you have control on what’s published or not. Part 1 focuses on building the client with Flash Builder 4 with the LC Service Discovery plugin. In part 2 you will see how to archive all tweets in a PDF/A format within LiveCycle Content Services.

Part1: http://www.vimeo.com/8886180

Part2: http://www.vimeo.com/8886413

As many people know, e-Invoicing is gaining a lot of traction these days in order to save money. In general many of the solutions use PDF as the format for the electronic invoice. But there is PDF and PDF. We have created a sample electronic Invoice in PDF format that is more then just a digital invoice, and also focuses on the experience of the recipient in addition to the ability to exchange structured data. Have a look at a video that includes a demo. If you would like to download the sample and play with it yourself, here it is.

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)