What’s new in LiveCycle Designer ES2?

Adobe has recently released LiveCycle ES2 – the second major update to their enterpise suite. This blog takes a look at what is new for PDF form developers and designers.

What is LiveCycle Designer?

LiveCycle Designer is the Adobe tool for building PDF forms.

Hang on a minute, can’t you do that with Acrobat? Yes, you can create simple forms by over-laying fields onto a PDF with Acrobat. You use Designer when you get serious about forms and want to provide your users with the best experience possible. Designer provides enhanced form functionality, including:

• Streamlined workflow; create content and form elements in a single tool. Content changes can be performed without having to re-apply form elements, such as accessibility tags
• Dynamic content; forms that personalise their content to the user and guide them through the data capture process. This is implemented with content show/hide and repeating sections
• Data connections; bind fields to external data sources for easier integration with other systems. Data structures are protected from changes to form layout
• Reuse; fragments, common objects and templates allow content to be reused across multiple forms

LiveCycle Designer is a Windows application that can be purchased on its own or comes bundled with Acrobat Pro and LiveCycle Workbench. The bundled version is automatically opened by its parent application when needed or can be opened stand-alone by running FormDesigner.exe

New features in Designer ES2

The most significant change to Designer is the removal of the Form Guide Builder. LiveCycle Guides are now built in Workbench and no longer require a base XDP file. There will be more on this in upcoming blogs.

There is minimal over-head in migrating to Designer ES2 due to very little change in the workflow of building PDF forms. What Adobe have given us in this release is additional features for making it easier to produce high quality forms. Form designers and developers can now be more productive than ever.

Please note that the minimum versions of Reader/Acrobat that you must support will determine which of these features are available to you. Contact Avoka if you need further information.

Action Builder

A common theme in my training courses and client engagements has been that form designers want to realise the benefits from the smart features of PDF forms without having to get too deep into coding.

Designer ES2 introduces Action Builder – a simple wizard interface for building useful, common behaviours with no coding, including showing/hiding an object, attaching a file, displaying a message box and perhaps the most useful of all – adding and removing repeating sections and table rows.

Clearly, a lot of thought has gone into Action Builder. It is surprisingly forgiving. It manages the code so that it continues to work even when you move and rename fields and works happily alongside custom code. It even handles the case when its generated code is changed.

Early indications are that this will be useful for experienced developers as well as designers and novice developers. It provides a useful starting point for advanced features, such as clearing the fields in the last row to be deleted in a dynamic table.

Error Messaging

A common requirement from clients  is to enhance the default error messaging provided by Acrobat/Reader. In fact, it is so common that Avoka has invested a significant amount of time in building a sophisticated errors framework for our clients’ forms.

Designer ES2 enhances the default behaviour by providing additional messaging handling options. Without coding, the form designer can configure:

• The behaviour of error message boxes
• How to highlight fields that fail validation
• How to highlight mandatory fields that are left empty
• Whether to set focus to the first field that fails validation

An interesting feature of this, is that it provides real-time validation. For instance, if you have configured the background colour of fields to turn red on failed validation, this will occur as soon as you exit an invalid field. Historically, this was difficult to achieve as it meant putting code on every field. This has been made simple in ES2 by the introduction of the next feature – event propogation.

Event Propogation

It is common to want a group of fields in a form to exhibit the same behaviour. For instance, you may want to strip leading and trailing spaces from text as it is entered into your form.

Designer provides several ways to do this when you are first building a form, including using  pre-coded common objects. However, it was difficult to maintain as any change would typically require changing code on multiple objects.

Event propogation makes this much easier by allowing code on an a container to be inherited by every object within that container. I could write my space stripping code in the exit event of a top level subform, turn on event propogation and have all text fields immediately start stripping text.

A nice feature of this is that it is accumulative; an object will execute the code it inherits from every one of its containers that propogate events in addition to any code that is written directly on its events.

Data Connection to Adobe Data Model

LiveCycle ES2 introduced the Adobe Data Model to make it easier to share data resources across applications, including LiveCycle guides and processes. Data from an ES2 Data Model can be displayed in a static form by using the new Adobe Data Model  data connection. Form fields are bound to data fields in the Designer data view pallet in the usual way.

Localisation

To create forms in multiple languages using XLIFF it is necessary to configure Designer to create a unique identifier for each text string. This can now be configured using the ‘Create Translation IDs when Saving’ property on the Document Handling section of the Options dialog box.

Three new locales have been added to Designer ES2: Catalan, Basque and Tagalog.

Usability Improvements

Based on community feedback, Adobe have made various usability improvements, including:

• Filtering data views. Makes it easier to handle large data connections by filtering for the sections that you are working on
• Integration with Workbench ES2. Workbench now opens forms for editing in Designer stand-alone which provides the full set of features and makes better use of screen real-estate. The two work well together – seamlessly opening and saving forms between the two
• Default scripting language. Rather than set the language to JavaScript every time you create a new form, you can now set it once in the Options dialog box
• Pasting into drop-downs and list boxes. Rather than enter each value of a list separately, you can now copy the entire list from a text editor and paste it into Designer
• Enhanced scripting assistance. The script pallet feature that suggests methods and properties as you type now provides additional information including input and output parameters
• Snap to Object. Makes it easier to layout objects in a positioned layout
• Metadata properties. You can now add custom properties to a form, such as copyright URLs, in the Info tab of the Document Properties dialog box

Find out more…

Resolve a specific LiveCycle Designer issue or have general questions answered by one of our experienced consultants by contacting Avoka.

Learn more by attending our certified LiveCycle Designer training course.

Explore what is possible with LiveCycle Designer on our website.