Thanks, but I'm lost - can you be more specific about *exactly* where the docs you mention are? There's a ton of stuff under 'quick start' and none of it looks particularly relevant to my problem.

However, the "Creating a .NET client assembly" stuff is no use - it describes exactly what I've done already (see initial posting above).
Hopefully the Quick Starts stuff will be more use...

Quick Starts not proving much use so far.

What I'm after, really, is something a bit like the stuff in sdkHelp/programmer/javadoc/com/adobe/livecycle/formsservice/client/Fo rmsServiceClient.html, but for .NET, and much, much more detailed.

In simple terms, what I've got is an XFA form template created in LiveCycle Designer, and some data that I want to import into it. I want to call the FormsService SOAP API to request a PDF document that's made up of my template and the data.

I'm using the Preview Release of Forms Server ES. This doesn't contain any helpful .NET DLLs so I'm having to create my own web service proxy class using the WSDL definition at "http://localhost:8080/soap/services/FormsService?wsdl".

This produces a class that exposes a handful of methods including "renderForm()" and "renderPDFForm". I'm trying to call these but I'm having to guess what the arguments are.

For instance, in the following example, can somebody tell me exactly what ALL these arguments are and what I need to supply to them in order to render the PDF:

public BLOB renderForm(
string formQuery,
FormPreference formPreference,
BLOB inDataDoc,
RenderOptionsSpec renderFormOptionsSpec,
string userAgent,
string applicationWebRoot,
string targetURL,
string contentRootURI,
string baseURL,
out BLOB outputXML,
out long pageCount,
out string locale,
out string actualRendering,
out FormsResult renderFormResult)

At the moment, when I call the above method, I'm getting the following error:

Soap Exception: System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapException: java.io.IOException: java.lang.NullPointerException at System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapHttpClientProtocol.ReadResponse(Soa pClientMessage message, WebResponse response, Stream responseStream, Boolean asyncCall) at System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapHttpClientProtocol.Invoke(String methodName, Object[] parameters) at FormsServiceService.renderForm(String formQuery, FormPreference formPreference, BLOB inDataDoc, RenderOptionsSpec renderFormOptionsSpec, String userAgent, String applicationWebRoot, String targetURL, String contentRootURI, String baseURL, BLOB& outputXML, Int64& pageCount, String& locale, String& actualRendering, FormsResult& renderFormResult)

Thanks I've seen your java example in the documentation already. I originally hoped to be able to use this as inspiration for my .NET version but ran into the diffiuclties I've mentioned previously

More interesting is the availability of a proper version of LiveCycle ES for evalutation purposes. If only I'd known about this earlier I wouldn't have wasted any time on the preview release.

Well, I'll scrap everything and start again with this, and see how it goes.

Well thank you Scott, I have now managed to install/configure the full trial version of LiveCycle ES and have finally got things working on a very basic level, using your sample code as a starting point.

Currently I have successfully rendered my original LiveCycle xfa template document using the above technique, and have also managed to populate some of the fields in it using some xml data.

The thing I need to now work out is how to populate dropdowns (combo box controls) with values on-the-fly, and to then also include pre-selected values for dropdowns in the xml data I pass to renderPDFForm().

Currently my dropdowns are being rendered as empty, and clearly this is because I haven't provided the list values for them. But where do I specify these and how do I include them in the call to renderPDFForm() ?

Hope you can help...