Parth on Livecycle

Easiest way to create powerful LiveCycle forms – SmartForm Composer

November 11th, 2010

• If you have found this page while struggling to get something to work in LiveCycle PDF form then you can’t afford to ignore this article .

• If you are thinking of creating more than 2 PDF forms for your organisation then this post has something that can save you days, weeks and lots of coffee (Saves you $$$$) !!!

Anyone who has created PDF forms in Adobe LiveCycle designer can tell that a complex, fully functional, good looking form with lot of fields can be a challenge to get it right in rapid development environment.

Adobe LiveCycle Designer is a powerful tool and has features to create really amazing forms but it has its downside as well. It can be a serious learning curve. This can limit the productivity as only few guys in the IT or development department can do it for business. This doesn’t scale very well in current economic time as well.

Before I introduce what I think is the easiest and  fastest way to create powrful PDF forms, Let me highlight what I think is causing the most pain when we have to create PDF forms that work with LiveCycle ES or any other data capture and processing system.

Reason 1: No Pain, No Gain of form requirements saga

Getting the PDF form specification with details like field validation, mandatory logic, show-hide logic,  tooltip text, look and feel details is a mammoth task. It’s crucial to get it right BUT it is a challenging to pass on the same requirements to developer. (Imagine at least a 5 pager form with minimum of 100 fields and different look and fill for print and online usage)

Reason 2: No direct visibility to business into form development activity

Unless the business analyst or a subject matter expert sits next to the form designer, it is going to be hard to get a decent look and feel in place in the first iteration. Field placement, correct tooltip text, field grouping with correct title on section etc will just take up lot of time before a final version of the form is released. And then comes the small requests like can you change tooltips as per attached document as legal or usability team has amended them!!? So on and so forth….it just happens..right?

Reason 3: Form development in a team

Forms development in team environment with templates and libraries being shared has its own challenges. Thanks to fragments, so we can update every form that uses it by just opening it and saving again in Designer. But what if a library component needs a change and you have used it 100 times in 20 forms?? The answer…..Outsourcing/hire a  housewife or uni student!!!! In short, sharing of library and template components, maintaining them and making sure that forms have the most up to date library components is a big exercise for any development team.

Reason 4: Compliance to standard L&F and bulk update

I think the reason 4 is self explanatory.

And, my list goes on and on and on….. Over the years I’ve seen so many things that I think can be tackled in much more better and cost effective way. Finally I use a tool that helps me to manage these in a more elegant way.

The Solution:

Avoka SmartForm Composer

I’ve been fortunate enough to see this product maturing from its inception. The amazing simplicity this product brings into the SmartForm development is never seen before.

It would be just too long blog post if I had to go through my fav features of this tool. But fortunately Howard and his team has put together videos to introduce the features and SmartForm Composer’s capabilities to give you an idea of this tool. They can be found at here.

I would definitely recommend to watch those videos. It might just change your perception on how easy and quickly you can get a fully functional and yet powerful form without minimal scripting.

Feel free to comment on this post if you want to know all of the reasons why I would prefer this tool over creating a form in designer. I’ll happily post a new blog entry with them.

Filed under: LiveCycle Designer,LiveCycle ES,LiveCycle ES2