Stefan Cameron on Forms

Final Post: XFA Tank Wars

Stefan Cameron — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 22:00:42 +0000

Dear Readers and Fellow Form Developers,

The time has come for me to focus my extra energy on other goals and projects at Adobe and at home.

I have thoroughly enjoyed helping the XFA community for these past 4.5 years. All of the content on this blog was a direct result of your questions and I learned a great deal about Adobe’s XFA technology and its LiveCycle Enterprise Suite along the way. Thank you!

I leave you now with a final “form to end all forms” (in my mind, anyway): A version of the classic Tank Wars game implemented entirely in XFA + JavaScript.

Why do this, you wonder? Well, it was a good challenge, you couldn’t embed Flash in an XFA form back then and I wanted to do something that would really put LiveCycle Designer’s Script Editor through its usability paces.

Comments are now closed on all posts and pages except for this one and the XFA Tank Wars page which will close on December 31, 2010. I will continue to host this blog for your reference and bookmarks however I cannot guarantee it will be available forever.

Good luck on all your present and future form development projects.

Stefan

Adobe Acrobat X Sneak Peak

Stefan Cameron — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 21:41:37 +0000

The new version of Acrobat, Acrobat X (pronounced “10” like the number, not “x” like the letter), has been announced and the Acrobat User Community has a couple of “first look” eSeminars that you might want to join in order to see what’s new before the official release/ship date about 30 days away:

LiveCycle Designer ES2 SP2 Now Available

Stefan Cameron — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 13:39:49 +0000

For those of you who have the right licensing agreement, you can now download the LiveCycle ES2 Service Pack 2 patch which updates LiveCycle Designer ES2 to version 9.0.0.2 as well as Workbench and LiveCycle as a whole if you have them installed.

New Web Service Sample Form Posted

Stefan Cameron — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 16:44:28 +0000

It was recently brought to my attention that the web service used by my sample form for my tutorial on connecting a form to a web service is no longer operational. Obviously, that makes the sample form much less useful so I have posted a second sample form that uses a different web service. If you have been struggling with the original sample, please have a look at the new one I posted in an update to the original post.

LiveCycle Designer ES2 Service Pack 1

Stefan Cameron — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 16:06:46 +0000

The LiveCycle ES2 SP1 update is now available and includes an update to LiveCycle Designer ES2.

New LiveCycle Enterprise Cafe Knowledge Application

Stefan Cameron — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 16:24:06 +0000

There is a new version of Adobe LiveCycle Café, renamed Adobe Enterprise Café, available for download. The new version lets you “aggregate content related to Adobe LiveCycle ES (Enterprise Suite), Acrobat, Connect, ColdFusion, and the Adobe Flash Platform in a timely and customized fashion.”

If you haven’t tried this out yet, it’s a great knowledge tool that lets you search across the entire Adobe Developer Community and Adobe DevNet resources, as well as get news updates, feeds, online training, events, etc., all in a single Adobe AIR application. You can even chat with other Adobe Developers who are online.

Show the List of a Drop Down List

Stefan Cameron — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 03:06:12 +0000

Did you know that the list portion of a drop down list field can be displayed programmatically? You can set focus to the field and force its drop list to be displayed all in a single API call:

xfa.host.openList(@object)
xfa.host.openList(@string) -- deprecated since XFA 2.6

where @object is a reference to the drop down list field and @string is the SOM expression of the drop down list field.

xfa.host.openList(myDropDownList); // set focus/show the drop list

The second form of the API has been deprecated since XFA 2.6 which means that since Designer 8.1, it is preferred to use the first form which takes a reference to the field rather than its SOM expression.

If you’re using Designer 8.0 or earlier, you can get the SOM expression of any field by using its somExpression property:

xfa.host.openList(ddlInDesigner71.somExpression)

This works in both JavaScript and FormCalc with the same syntax.

Now if only there was a way to programmatically show the drop calendar of a date/time field…

Border and Margins in Flowed Layouts

Stefan Cameron — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 11:31:48 +0000

My friends at Avoka have posted a very useful tutorial on the unexpected behavior of borders in flowed layouts and how to use margins to fix it. Check it out!

Post Frequency Change

Stefan Cameron — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 21:14:29 +0000

Just a quick note to make you aware that while I may not be posting very frequently for the time being, I am still actively responding to your questions via comments.

Excerpts of the 10 most recent comments are now conveniently located directly on the home page, in case you want to see the latest activity.

Acrobat JavaScript Debugger on XFA Forms

Stefan Cameron — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 17:14:30 +0000

Many of you have been requesting some debugging features for XFA Forms (and I’m sure many more of you just haven’t voted for it yet). It so happens that Acrobat Pro has a JavaScript Debugger which can be used — to a limited extent — with XFA Forms. See John Brinkman’s post to learn more about it — thanks John!

As he puts it, there are limitations, the biggest ones of them being, in my opinion, the inability to debug script objects and the inability to retain breakpoints between debugging sessions. Nonetheless, this tool can give you way more insight than the good old “JavaScript Console + saveXML(‘pretty’)” combination can in certain cases, and it does it in a nice tree to boot!