Radio Buttons - ALL select at same time

Report · Dec 21, 2016

Obviously I am missing something basic. I have created a pdf form from a webpage and it includes a 3-choice set of radio buttons, M, F, Either. All three buttons have the same name. Each button has a different Radio Button Choice value (M, F, Either). Yet when I click on any one of the three, all three buttons are selected.

Mac OS X 10.10

Acrobat 10.1.1

Thanks,

Paul

Report · Dec 21, 2016

That's strange... Can you share the file in question (via Dropbox, Google Drive, Adobe Cloud, etc.) with us?

Report · Dec 21, 2016

Yes, I can. I have created a Dropbox folder containing the file. With whom do I share?

Report · Dec 21, 2016

Make it a public file and post the link to it here.

Report · Dec 21, 2016

Dropbox - Acrobat Forum

Report · Dec 21, 2016

How did you create the file? There is something odd about the form field names. When I change the names from e.g. "JnL3Byb3Bvc2VfcGRmLnNodG1sAA==.form1.rights" to something much shorter (e.g. "Rights"), it works correctly.

The form is rights-enabled, so you have to "save a copy" first before you can make changes.

Report · Dec 21, 2016

Interesting. Acrobat created those names when I imported an html form.

Report · Dec 21, 2016

Yeah, the field names are very odd... What version of Acrobat are you using?

Report · Dec 21, 2016

10.1.1

Report · Dec 21, 2016

I recommend you update to a newer version. The latest available for the X version is 10.1.16: Adobe - Acrobat : For Macintosh

Report · Dec 26, 2016

I upgraded to 10.1.16. I still get those ridiculously long field names (that screw up my radio buttons) when creating a pdf from a web page.

I tried to work around this by creating the pdf from a local webpage file; that also gave the long field names (though a different long prefix) as when creating from the web.

Since the form changes from time-to-time, I am trying to avoid having to modify field names in the pdf every time.

Any ideas how to avoid those long field names?

Thanks,

Paul

Report · Dec 28, 2016

I just created a simple HTML form and converted it to PDF using Adobe Acrobat Pro X 10.1.16 on Mac OS X 10.11.6 (I don't have a 10.10 version readily available), and I did not end up with the problem you are describing. I am still getting long field names, but the radio buttons behave correctly. Do you have a form you can share?

What you are experiencing definitely sounds like a bug, and you should report it here: Feature Request/Bug Report Form

Because it's not easily reproducible (at least not with a simple form), you may also want to point to the form in question.

Report · Dec 28, 2016

Here is the form on a webpage.

parishplayers.org/propose_pdf_test.shtml

Thanks,

Paul

Report · Dec 28, 2016

I also reported it as suggested.

Report · Dec 29, 2016

It looks like a radio button group within a table cell will cause this

problem. There is something that is added to the PDF file that changes the

behavior of an otherwise correct radio button group. I don't think it's the

long name, because I get that with a normal radio button group as well. It

must be something below the surface, and when you make a change to the

radio button group, it seems to fix that problem.

One thing you could do is to run a script that would re-recreate all radio

button groups - similar to what I've done in this article, which actually

converts radio button groups into checkbox groups:

http://khkonsulting.com/2014/07/convert-radio-button-groups-checkbox-groups-pdf-forms/

You would not create a new checkbox group, but create another radio button

group (with the same name).

Report · Dec 31, 2016

Interesting. It doesn't seem to be the table cells that are causing this. I revised the entire form to use css and it still happens! See this:
parishplayers.org/propose_pdf_div.shtml

Report · Dec 31, 2016

There goes my theory I did very limited testing, and it looked like as soon as I introduced the table, the problem started to happen.

Report · Dec 31, 2016

Here is another theory: When one of the radio buttons is checked by default, the group behaves correctly.

<html>
  <head>
  <title>
  PDF Form
  </title>
  </head>
  <body>
  <p>Some text</p>
  <form>
  <input type="radio" name="someData" value="Abc" checked /> ABC<br/>
  <input type="radio" name="someData" value="def" /> def<br/>
  </form>
  <p>Some text</p>
  </body>
</html>

When I take the "checked" out, we are back to the wrong behavior.

Report · Nov 03, 2017

Yes, thank you, Karl. Not ideal, as always checking Male get me into PC trouble, but it does work. I did submit this bug to Adobe last December and heard nothing further.

Sorry for the long delay in confirmation - this project got pushed to the back burner.

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Radio Buttons - ALL select at same time

1 Correct answer