Signature Fields are not merged into the form design with other data fields.

[hy_ob]

I have an application that hosts LiveCycle Forms and saves submitted data for later retrieval etc. I am using the LiveCycle ES web services APIs to render the forms as PDF forms and process the submitted data. When the user submits the form I use the APIs to extract the submitted data as XDP and store it so I can later display it by merging it back into the form design. If the user wants to view a previously submitted form (and possibly modify it etc.) I take the saved XDP data and tell the Adobe LiveCycle server to render it on the form design.

This all works well until I try to render a saved form that has signature fields that have been signed. Although the saved XDP contains an embedded base64 blob with the PDF that includes the signed signature fields, when Adobe LiveCycle merges this XDP into the form design the signatures are removed. The data for all the other fields is correctly merged into the rendered PDF, but all the signature fields appear as unsigned (as if they have never been signed).

Can anyone help explain what is going on and how I can make it work with signature fields, too?

I am using LiveCycle ES 8.2 (Forms and Reader Extensions to enable the signature fields in Adobe Reader).

Thank you!

[Former Community Member]

You cannot re-render a form that contained signatures without "destroying" the original signatures.  If the form is set to submit back XDP, make sure that you include the PDF in the submitted data.  You could then extract the base 64 encoded PDF from the XDP and decode it to get the signed PDF.