Change between FormGuide and PDF

[Former Community Member]

Few months ago there was some Adobe presentation that showed, how user could change the view between form guide and pdf at runtime in workspace. Is it possible now in livecycle ES?



If it is, how can I make it work?

[Former Community Member]

Hi,



I don't know that this is really feasible automaticaly under LiveCycle ES. While its true that Forms can be rendered as either PDF, HTML or as a Form Guide - the designer for Form Guides is different to the PDF and HTML designer. You cannot take a form designed to be rendered as PDF and have it automatically render as a Form Guide.



Even getting a more advanced form that has been designed to render as PDF to render as HTML is very challenging. HTML forms only support a subset of the Javascript and XFA capabilities. You would need to design your form with these limitations in mind in order to achieve reasonable results.



In some of the Adobe LC ES demo's they show forms that are displayed as Form Guides - then they have a button to redisplay as a PDF. In these examples someone has used the Form Guide designer to create the Form Guide. Then they have used the PDF Form designer to create another Form Design to render the PDF view. Both designs would share a commom XML data model.



Hope this helps.



Philip

[Jasmin_Charbonn]

I just want to add some clarifications to what Philip explained.



When you first design an xfa based form (xdp), you use the LC Form Designer. At that point you create and XDP and LC Forms can render that XDP into PDF or HTML (or other transformations).



Now with LC Designer ES, you have a new menu that allows you to generate a Form Guide for that XDP. The Guide Builder is a plug-in written in Flex that helps you design your Guide.



It creates a basic Form Guide that you can customize. Once you save the Form Guide, it adds a little bit of information in the XDP to tell LC Forms that the form can be generated as a Form Guide.



So the things I wanted to clarify, is yes, you can generate a PDF, HTML or Form Guide from the same XDP template. You do need to "Guide Enable it" by creating a form guide within the form designer.



Because a Form Guide is built from an XDP within the Form Designer, you'll always have a PDF representation of that guide which comes from that XDP.



Both format Form Guide and XDP are sharing the same data model and some of the same logics (some script, validations, mandatory fields, etc).



Jasmin

[HowardTreisman]

Hi Jasmin

Is there a document that indicates what "some script" means?

Thanks,

Howard

[Former Community Member]

So.. You are saying that XDP can be rendered as PDF, HTML or Form Guide. I kind of knew that already. And I have made few Form guides with Guide Builder. But I still didn't get full picture about this. So we first create a XDP and after that, we create a Form guide with Guide Builder. Done that.



What after that? I must choose some render service in process designer but if I want user to be able to switch between form guide and pdf in runtime, how I can "enable" this? For example, I want the user to fill the data with form guide but the user could switch to pdf at some point to print the form and switch back to form guide to submit it. How actually do this?

[Jasmin_Charbonn]

If you use the Sample - Forms/Render Form Guide/Render Form Guide service as your render service to render your form into a guide, you should get 4 icons in the top right of your guide. The last one allows you to switch between PDF and Guide. The other one allow you to print, email and save the PDF version of the guide.



If you're making your own service, make sure the "Guide PDF" option is set to true on the renderFormGuide operation



Jasmin

[Former Community Member]

Is there a method to change from the Form guide to the PDF form using Javascript, without having to select the PDF button from the top of the form guide?

[Former Community Member]

So you would put a button on the guide to switch you over - and how about getting back? In either case the user has to hit something to perform the operation. Can you explain why you want to do this?