Click on any phrase to play the video from that point.
[ADOBE DEVELOPER CONNECTION]
[Duane Nickull, Senior Technical Evangelist]
Hi, I'm Duane Nickull.
I'm almost shouting because I'm so excited about LiveCycle ES2.
If you haven't tried it out, there's so many new features, and
LiveCycle ES2 has one of the most sought after features
that were requested from previous versions of LiveCycle.
And this is on the designer itself.
I'm going to show you this really cool thing called Action Builder.
Action Builder takes a lot of the guesswork out of creating
simple scripts for your PDF forms.
Very, very intuitive and very easy to use.
When I see the LiveCycle designer team, I'm going to buy them a beer.
Yes, Jeff, you will get a beer out of this.
Okay, let's start looking at it, shall we?
So I've got the LiveCycle designer installed on my computer.
This one is the one that ships with ES2,
so it's a little bit different from some of the other ones that we've used in the past.
When I create a new form, I'm going to do a simple use case.
This simple use case will be just to add
a form with a drop down list.
And we're going to make the drop down list have two choices on it.
We're going to set a text field in, as well.
The idea is going to be that the text field must be disabled
until somebody does something
with the drop down list.
To make this happen, it used to take a little bit of know-how
with coding and people would have to
look at the JavaScript in the code
and add a lot of thinking into building the forms.
Luckily, this is much easier with the LiveCycle ES2
build of designer.
So I've got my form set up.
I've got the drop down list on it, and I've got the text field.
First, let's go down to the drop down list
and add a couple values.
We'll call this 'value1',
and then we'll add 'value 2'.
And now, we're going to set up on our
form that the text field must be disabled
when the user gets to the page.
So go up to this top menu, 'tools',
and click on 'action builder'.
And we see here we have no actions because this is a new form.
Then we click on the 'add a new action' button.
Now we can choose the condition, so when object--
so we've got a number of things--
so we can take objects,
we could detect events on the button that drop down as text field itself.
But in this case, what we're going to do is, we're going to detect
when the form has initialized or finished loading
and select a result.
We're going to enable or disable an object,
and we're going to select 'text field 1'.
We're going to set it to disable,
so there's our first action builder rule.
And now what we want to do is make it so that when the drop down list is used,
that the person who uses the form when they select a value,
it actually makes the text field enabled.
So we'll go back to the tools action builder
and add a new one 'said when object',
drop down list is changed--and you can see there's a couple of others;
there's initialized, entered, exited, text changes, etc.--we're just going to do change.
Select a result, enable or disable and object,
and we're going to set the same object text field to be enabled.
Now, if you want to see the code that this generated,
this can be done by simply sliding down the barrier,
and you can see the code that is being generated.
It's very important not to edit this code.
The code that's being generated up here, you woudln't want to mess around with.
And if we want to see this running, we can click the Preview PDF
and see if we got the expected behavior.
So here's our PDF form launching,
it's finished loading up, and we have our text field.
I put my cursor in here, and when I type,
you can see that I'm not getting the ability to put anything in this text field.
If I check a value,
it's now enabled for editing, and I can add something into it.
It's really that easy.
We could take this concept and do a lot more with it,
but I'd rather you download this, pick up the DVD, install it, and get going on this.
It's so easy to use.
There's so many possibilities, and it takes a lot of the guesswork
out of designing your PDF forms for LiveCycle ES.
I'm Duane Nickull, and I'm excited about LiveCycle. [dnickull@adobe.com]
Contact us here at the show if you want the software.
[ADOBE DEVELOPER CONNECTION]
