1. How To Use Adobe Livecycle Designer
2. Adobe Livecycle Designer Es4 Manual
3. Adobe Livecycle Designer For Beginners

Adobe LiveCycle Enterprise Suite (ES4) is a service-oriented architectureJava EE server software product from Adobe Systems used to build applications that automate a broad range of business processes for enterprises and government agencies. LiveCycle ES4 is an enterprise document and form platform that allows capturing and processing information, delivering personalized communications, and protecting and tracking sensitive information. It is used for purposes such as account opening, services and benefits enrollment, correspondence management, request for proposal processes, and other manual based workflows. LiveCycle ES4 incorporates new features with a particular focus on mobile devices. LiveCycle applications also function in both online or offline environments. These capabilities are enabled through the use of Adobe Reader, HTML/PhoneGap and the Flash Player clients to reach desktop computers and mobile devices.

Adobe LiveCycle Designer is a forms authoring tool published by Adobe Systems, intended as a one-stop design tool to render XML forms as PDF or HTML files. Designer began as a component of PerForm, an Electronic forms. Acrobat 8 Professional includes Adobe LiveCycle Designer for creating forms. In this tutorial, learn how to use the form templates that ship with LiveCycle Designer to quickly and easily create a PDF form for data collection. You can ask a question and get an answer from one of our experts. This tutorial demonstrates how to use JavaScript to allow the choice of one dropdown to affect the choices of another dropdown. The JavaScript 'Switch' statement in the 'exit' event of a dropdown.

The LiveCycle platform is made up of a number of integrated solution^[buzzword] components and developer tools, some of which are discussed below.

• 1LiveCycle ES4 solution^[buzzword] components
  • 1.1LiveCycle ES4 data capture products
  • 1.2LiveCycle ES4 document security
  • 1.3LiveCycle ES4 document generation products
• 2LiveCycle ES4 tooling products

LiveCycle ES4 solution^[buzzword] components[edit]

LiveCycle ES4 solution^[buzzword] components are various types of services available to developers including those needed to capture information, manage and optimize processes,secure information, invoke web services, create documents, and integrate with other applications and data sources. The solution^[buzzword] components leverage^[buzzword] shared 'foundation' services which include administration and configuration services, service orchestration, invocation methods across components, and encryption services.

LiveCycle ES4 data capture products[edit]

LiveCycle Forms Standard ES4[edit]

LiveCycle Forms Standard allows users to create and deploy XML-based form templates as PDFs. Forms can be saved for offline use in Adobe Reader when they are reader extended, a capability included in Forms Standard. LiveCycle Forms ES4 supports a PDF document, the user selects the capabilities they want to enable, then Reader would enable that functionality when opening the document or form. The user can select all or any combination of the following capabilities: commenting, import and export of form data, ability to submit outside of a web browser, enable database and web services capabilities, capture digital signatures, enable data capture in 2D barcodes and embed file attachments.

LiveCycle ES4 document security[edit]

LiveCycle Digital Signatures ES4[edit]

LiveCycle Digital Signatures automates electronic signature workflows for assurances of authenticity, integrity, and non-repudiation. Organizations can use this component to sign documents in bulk, such as university transcripts, government documents, annual budgets, grant approvals, or tax returns. This component will also validate previously signed documents in bulk. The digital signature capabilities are based on the functionality available in Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Reader on the desktop.^[1]

LiveCycle Rights Management ES4[edit]

LiveCycle Rights Management is an enterprise digital rights management (EDRM) product that provides data centric security with user access and control policies to various types of data including PDF and Flash Video - and also native formats including Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Rights management allows document 'leasing' for a finite period of time before it has to reconnect with the server. The product also includes detailed audit trail reporting for rights-protected information, dynamic watermarking, expiration, and version control.

LiveCycle ES4 document generation products[edit]

LiveCycle PDF Generator ES4[edit]

LiveCycle PDF Generator is server-based software that automates the creation, assembly, and manipulation of PDF documents. It converts documents authored in native source applications such as Word, Excel, or PowerPoint and many others into PDF documents. It supports the creation of customized PDF document packages by assembling or disassembling existing PDF files or PDF pages and adding dynamic custom elements such as headers, footers, links,bookmarks, tables of contents, and watermarks. In addition, it can convert PDF to PostScript, image, or PDF/A formats for direct server-based printing or compliance with archiving requirements. There is also optical character recognition (OCR) functionality with this product to create searchable PDF documents from scanned images.

LiveCycle Output ES4[edit]

LiveCycle Output automates the generation of template-driven, final-form documents. It merges XML data with LiveCycle Designer templates to generate personalized documents in PDF, PostScript, PCL, or Zebra label formats. It includes capabilities to assemble or disassemble existing PDF files or PDF pages and supports adding dynamic custom elements such as headers, footers, links, bookmarks, tables of contents, and watermarks to create customized PDF document packages. It also converts PDF to PostScript,image, or PDF/A formats for direct server-based printing or compliance with archiving requirements.

LiveCycle Correspondence Management ES4[edit]

LiveCycle Correspondence Management centralizes the creation, management and delivery of customized correspondence. Personalized communications such as statements, letters, or notices can be created with a mix of custom-authored and pre-approved content and delivered through the customer's channel of choice. The solutions^[buzzword] can also increase organizational compliance, consistency, visibility, and control with templates, pre-approved content blocks, audit trails, and advanced archive searching.

LiveCycle ES4 ECM connectors[edit]

LiveCycle ES4 Connectors for ECM integrates other ECMs (enterprise content management systems) with LiveCycle for design time asset management and runtime process management. At design time, users can manage assets for the application including forms, fragments, images, and other content assets in the ECM system. Developers can then access those assets directly within LiveCycle Workbench ES4 for the creation of forms, documents, and packages. The connectors also enable business processes to retrieve content objects, as well as their content attributes or metadata directly from the ECM system. Specific ECM systems supported by these connectors include IBM Content Manager, IBM/FileNet content repository, Microsoft SharePoint, and EMC/Documentum's document repository. LiveCycle also provides native support for connecting to Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), its web content management (WCM) system.

How To Use Adobe Livecycle Designer

LiveCycle ES4 tooling products[edit]

LiveCycle Workbench ES4[edit]

The primary development tool to create LiveCycle applications is LiveCycle Workbench. This is an Eclipse-based development environment which allows developers to create form templates and process designs that can be integrated with a variety of data sources and existing applications. It includes an integrated repository for collaborative development, and simplifies deployment via an archive file which contains all of the assets associated to the application. The process design environment enables drag and drop of process services to create process workflows and also provides the ability for developers to save them as single WSDL-based components for others developers to use.

LiveCycle Designer ES4[edit]

Form authors and developers use LiveCycle Designer to build templates that merge with enterprise data to deliver interactive forms or personalized documents in a wide variety of electronic or print formats. LiveCycle Designer ES4 is included in every LiveCycle ES4 installation and embedded within LiveCycle Workbench ES4.

Adobe Flash Builder integrates with the LiveCycle ES4 environment. Using Flex Builder developers can create RIAs and create custom additions to forms created in LiveCycle Designer.

Implications for Document Management Systems[edit]

PDF documents restricted with LiveCycle DRM are sometimes impossible to use in non-Adobe document management systems because LiveCycle can prevent third-party software from disassembling the PDF, extracting pages, and displaying the contents.^[2] In these cases, if LiveCycle does not also prevent printing, users may resort to printing PDF documents from compatible Adobe software and scanning the printouts into unrestricted, rasterized PDF's that are usable in third-party software.

For example, a university admissions department may be unable to load an electronic transcript received from the National Student Clearinghouse, which allows client schools to restrict e-transcripts with Adobe LiveCycle,^[3] into admissions CRM software.

References[edit]

1. ^http://www.adobe.com/products/livecycle/modules-displayTab3.html#DigiSig
2. ^Clark, Alexander. 'Restrictions of electronic transcripts'. Slate Developer Network. Technolutions. Retrieved 4 January 2017.
3. ^'Transcript Services FAQs'. National Student Clearinghouse. Archived from the original on 5 January 2017. Retrieved 4 January 2017.

When I try to open a regular PDF (which doesn't contain an XFA form) using Adobe LiveCycle ES4 Designer it prompts a window (New Form Assistant) and asks me to select how I want to work with the PDF. The options are:

• Create an Interactive Form with Fixed Pages
• Create an Interactive Form with a Flowable Layout

I choose the first one and continue. Then, without doing anything I save the file (using save as). Save as type is 'Acrobat (Static) PDF Form (.pdf)*', and as a matter of fact that's the only option for this scenario. After I save the file, I figured out that, although both files are visually same in the PDF reader, the saved and the original files are different, such that, saved file contains XFA form. In my case XFA form is as follows:

I have two questions about this.

1. Can I open a regular PDF and add an XFA form to it withoutcorrupting the original PDF content, using the API?
2. If the first one is possible, can I add invisible fields to thatPDF, again using the API?

In short, what I want to do is adding a filled XFA form to a regular PDF and I'm asking if it is possible, using the API?

2 Answers

There is no API in Adobe LiveCycle that lets you insert an XFAF (XFA Foreground) form into a PDF.

It should be doable using various PDF libraries however. You need to create the form you want to add and then insert it into the PDF using a PDF library like iText, PDFBox or Big Faceless. Inserting is a little tricky however as the XDP is broken into sections in the PDF. I would generate a XFAF PDF using LiveCycle Designer and then examine it using the same PDF library that you intend to reproduce the process with.

The presence attribute isn't specifically excluded from the XFAF profile, so invisible fields should work, however I would test it with LiveCycle Designer first. If you add invisible fields into a Fixed Page PDF and it works (i.e. you test the resulting PDF - I have no doubt that it will let you add them but it's possible that it doesn't make them invisible) then you should be able to emulate that using a programatically constructed XFAF PDF.

Just a word of caution. This is not something that I think many people outside of the LiveCycle Designer team have tried. If you head down this route you will be blazing the trail.

Adobe Livecycle Designer Es4 Manual

When you select “Create an Interactive Form with Fixed Pages”, what is happening conceptually is that you are creating an XFA “overlay” on the existing PDF. You can add fields but not boilerplate.

The intended use case, is that you have an existing paper form that you have in PDF format and that you want to quickly add fields to it in order to make it interactive. You are essentially augmenting the existing PDF with some additional XFA functionality. Since the artwork remains in PDF, no conversion has occurred on it and it remains identical to the original unaltered document. You are, however, not creating a true XFA form because only the fields are defined in the XFA format so you cannot store it as an XDP. It can only be re-saved as a PDF. Also, since the PDF artwork is not broken down into moveable pieces (i.e. subforms), the form cannot grow/shrink dynamically. This is why it can only be saved as a static PDF. See the Adobe LiveCycle Designer help here and here.

When you select “Create an Interactive Form with a Flowable Layout”, Designer is converting the PDF into the XFA XML format. You can interact with the design just as if you had created everything from scratch using LiveCycle Designer.

Since this approach actually converts the PDF artwork into XML, there is a higher likelihood that some of the artwork may not convert exactly the same. It may require some manual fixups to get the form looking exactly as it did before. Some complex PDFs may not convert well at all. Fonts may not be available, etc. Again, this is covered under the Adobe LiveCycle Designer help here.

The benefit of this latter approach is that you have a full XFA form definition that can be used anywhere that a form that was developed from the ground up in LiveCycle Designer can be used. It can be modified to add dynamic sections that grow or shrink to match the data. The entire expressive power of an XFA-based form is opened up.

WRT your questions:

1. You can open a regular PDF and add XFA fields to the form. You can then use those fields to capture data and save that data out as XML data.

2. You can add invisible XFA fields as well.

Adobe Livecycle Designer For Beginners

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