Roland-Lopez

First let’s understand how LiveCycle renders a form in the workspace for a specific process. When you set your process you set an input variable which holds the form to render. LiveCycle by default assigns the “Default Renderer” service to this variable so that it gets rendered properly in the Workspace. This “Default Renderer” is just a short-lived process with several activities that sets variables and enables your form for the workspace.

If you want to pre-populate a form with data, all you have to do is create your custom renderer service. For instance, let’s say you want to render a PDF form in the Workspace. So we need the “Render PDF Form” (see image 1) from the “Samples Forms” category (this samples should be in your process list unless you/the administrator didn’t upload the LiveCycle Archives that comes with the installation). This process takes a PDF form and renders it to the Workspace. First the short-lived process sets some parameters, then renders the form using the renderPDFForm operation from the Forms Service, and then enables the PDF Form to be rendered in the workspace.

 

To pre-populate the form we need to get the logged in user info and inject that into the form before getting to the “render Form” activity. To do that you can copy the “Render PDF Form” process into a new process. Then to your new process you want to:

1-      Add two input variables: one called “userId” of type string and another one xmlData of type xml. 

2-      In the first step of the process you want to extract the form’s XML data and assign that to the xmlData variable. 

3-      Then, use the “Query Single Row” operation from the “JDBCService” and query the LiveCycle database to get the user’s info based on the “userId” variable. You can use the LiveCycle’s default datasource which should be “IDP_DS”. Your query will look something like
“SELECT canonicalname, commonname, email, organization, address
                FROM edcprincipalentity e
                                WHERE e.id = [xpath to your userId variable]”

4-      Now that you have the form’s XML data you can assign values to the fields by using XPath. So, parse the query results and assign the values to the correspondent fields. LiveCycle won’t be able to decipher the XPath to the form fields, so you need to know those. However, that should be simple. Just use your main process (where your form variable is defined) and look at the path of your fields) and get your XPath from there. Beware that the xmlData variable of your rendering process matches to the last “data” node of your form variable in the main process. So that your xmlData XPath matches the main process form’s variable XPath like this:

/process_data/xmlData/ = /process_data/[formVarName]/object/data/xdp/datasets/data/
This means that if your form’s fields XPath translates to /process_data/[formVarName]/object/data/xdp/datasets/data/txtFullNameThen, your path translates to /process_data/xmlData/txtFullName  in your rendering process.

5-      Once you have assigned all the values you want to your xmlData variable, you have to inject now this new XML into the input document. If you copied the Render PDF Form, as I mentioned at the beginning, then your input doc var is called inDocData. By assigning the xmlData to the inDocData, LC will know that all you want to do is replace the XML part of the document variable.

 Now that you have pre-populated the input document with the logged in user’s info everything else in the process remains the same. So, your final rendering process should look something like this (See image 2):



Image 2: Custom Render PDF Form With User Info Process Design

Remember that on your main process you need to set this as the rendering service for the input form. Once you select this as your rendering service, you’ll notice that the userId variable you set on your rendering service will appear as a “Service Input” variable. Assign the “User’s Id” variable from the “task” to the “userId” input variable. Set the rest of the variables the with the same values as when you use the Render PDF Form service. 

Now, if you initiate your process from the workspace, you’ll get the form pre-populated with the logged in user info. If it doesn’t, read this post again and make sure you understand all the services used here. Also, remember that you can debug your process using the “Variable Logger” service.

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What’s all the buzz about Adobe LiveCycle ES?

Have you heard about LiveCycle and how great it is but never had a chance to see it in action? Maybe you’ve heard how it can unlock PDF documents, control who can view/print/copy documents even when these have left your network, render forms in multiple formats (HTML, PDF and SWF) all with a single file. Learn why the buzz about LiveCycle ES and why renowned companies like Wachovia and the Federal Government are using LiveCycle ES to automate their business processes.

Unleash the power of Reader Extensions ES

Have you ever filled out a PDF form and, after all the effort, noticed you cannot save your data? Or maybe try to add attachments, comments, signatures, connect to a database but are unable because of the limitations of Adobe Reader? Learn how you can use LiveCycle Reader Extensions ES to unlock these and more capabilities for single or bulk PDF documents.

Check this out!  Tomorrow, Flex Camp DC will be broadcast LIVE and FREE by AboutWeb and Adobe.  Check the post from Phil Nacelli below:

"Just want to pass on the word that tomorrow AboutWeb LLC and Adobe Systems will be hosting the Flex Camp Washington, DC 2008. This is one-day gathering with Adobe Flex experts covering everything you need to know about the power of Flex, the upcoming release of Flex 3, and a bit about the much anticipated Adobe Air.

Since we have already surpassed the registration capacity, we are going to be broadcasting the entire event live on Adobe Connect from 9:30am to 12:00pm and then after lunch break from 1:00pm to 5:00pm (All times are Eastern Standard Time).

To view the event go to http://adobechats.adobe.acrobat.com/dcflexcamp08/, choose the "Enter as a Guest" option and click "Enter Room" after entering your name. We look forward to seeing you online!"

I’ll be speaking in the next LiveCycle User Group meeting in February at the David Packard Conference Center in DC. The topics I’ll be presenting are:

• Capabilities and usage of Reader Extensions
• Integrating LiveCycle ES with your backend systems
  

To register and to see more details on this meeting go to the Capital Area LiveCycle User Group website at: http://www.dc-livecycle.com/index.cfm?event=meetings.showMeeting&meetingId=29

• Transfer Support
  A subscription and/or per incident model for support as pertaining to Transfer installation, use and/or any overall issues.
  
  
• Transfer Training
  A Transfer curriculum that will come in a series of short courses, as well as single/multiple day training programs, covering both on-line training, and in-person training.
  
  
• Transfer Developer Certification
  Much like ColdFusion Developer Certification,a Developer certification give you a listing on the new Transfer site as certified, as well as a spiffy certificate.
  
  
• Transfer Training Certification
  Again, much like ColdFusion Training Certification, this would give you a listing on the Certified Trainers page on the Transfer ORM site, as well as access to the training materials.

When working with web applications we often, very often, face the problem that the configurations in the various environments where the application will be deployed differ from one another.  This could be anything from different datasource names, security credentials, email server address and most important it could be an application setting to set your application mode (dev mode, live mode).  I say “most important” because if you have an e-commerce this flag could be the difference between charging customers or letting every transaction go through (Free goodies!).

 A way to deal with this problem (I believe the most commonly adopted) is to use a config file to set all this properties.  That’s where the famous “.ini” comes in (or XML), which is that text file with the variables for an environment.  It does the job but now you have a config file per environment and this could be a local, a dev, a staging and a production file.  So, now you have another problem, which is you have to make sure not to replace any of these files every time you do an update to your app (been there, done that).  You can use Ant to avoid making this mistake but you still have multiple copies of the config file lying around.  So, what if you can have a single file that “knows” what properties and values to use depending on the environment that is at?

Rob Gonda and I, created a very simple environment configurator that works of a single XML file and sets the needed properties based on the server is at.  We did this over a year ago but neither of us took the time to blog about it.  Now that I still see developers using multiple config files, I’ve decided post this as a small project on RIAForge.org. I’ve called it Environment Config for lack of creativeness, I guess.

The basics:

It consists of 2 files, one XML file and one CFC.  In the XML file you define all your environments and properties and pass the location of the file to the CFC which will parse your XML file and return a structure with the properties. Is that simple!

The Anatomy of the Environment XML:

Then they provide the following example which has some obvious errors:

<cfdocument format="pdf">
    <cfdocumentsection ../>
    ...
    ...
    <cfform type="html/xform">
        <cfinput type="textbox" name="employeeName" value="#fullName#" 
readonly="true">
        <cfinput type="textbox" name="employeeID" value="#id#" readonly>
        <cfselect name="contributionPercentage" options="#optionsStruct#"
 required="true">
        <cfinput type="submit" name="SubmitAsHTTPPost">
        <cfinput type="submit" name="SubmitAsPDF" submitType="PDF">
    </cfform>
    ...
    ...
    <cfdocumentsection ../>
</cfdocument>

Of course I got all excited about it but after several attempts all I got was a 
PDF document that looked like a form but that didn't work at all. It was merely 
a PDF Document.

 So I wonder, is this a big goof from Adobe or can you really create dynamic PDF forms with ColdFusion (without any LiveCycle interaction).

Interesting thing I came across in the past couple of days.  At work we have setup a TurnKey installation of LiveCycle ES for testing purposes.  As you might know this means LiveCycle is deployed in JBOSS with MySQL as the backend database.

Well, being a newbie to JBoss and because I did not take the time to Read the JBoss documentation since this was for testing purposes (Who does anyways?) I stumbled upon a merciless error that did not want to go away!

At one point I renamed the default data-source(DefaultDS) to something else and updated several files as mentioned in this tutorial from onjava.com.

Changing the name of the default data-source caused a connection failure since the “DefaultDS” that was being referenced in many files (as I explain below) did not exist. So, the server log was being bombarded by this error every 5 seconds or so! 

javax.naming.NameNotFoundException: XAConnectionFactory”