For more details on how to accomplish this, see the knowledge base article at http://helpx.adobe.com/livecycle/kb/xfa-forms-mozilla-firefox-19.html.

Many a times, we have the requirement to deploy single or group of system or custom DSCs. System DSCs are deployed by LiveCycle Configuration Manager. However, in the case of custom DSCs, we need to manually deploy the component through LiveCycle Workbench. Sometimes, launching Workbench for solely deploying component seems like too much effort. Moreover, it’s not very easy to automate.

You can use the attached sample tool to deploy a DSC using command-line.

1. Download and extract the tool archive on your machine. It contains a folder libs, a runme.bat file, and an ImportDSC.jar file.
2. Place <LiveCycle Installation Dir>\sdk\client-libs\thirdparty\*.jar files in libs folder.
3. Place adobe-usermanager-client.jar and adobe-livecycle-client.jar files in libs folder.
4. Modify runme.bat accordingly.

The ImportDSC.jar is used in the following way in the runme.bat file (provided classpath is set):

java com.adobe.livecycle.sample.ImportDSC appserver=<websphere|weblogic|jboss> serverhost=<name of machine> port=<port of LC> username=<user to install DSC> password=<password of mentioned user> dscpath=<absolute path till DSC> force=<true|false>

The source code is also included in the archive. Please review it in case of any doubt and modify as per your requirements.

DISCLAIMER: This sample code is not officially delivered or supported as part of Adobe LiveCycle product. One should verify this on a testing environment before employing in production environment.

A discussion on Adobe forums indicates that a lot of LiveCycle users are trying to figure out how to programmatically split a PDF file. Adobe LiveCycle provides a simple method to programmatically split PDF documents using LiveCycle Assembler service. You can split PDF files using the bookmark tags or by page number.

To split the PDF documents, you require:

• A DDX (For more information about DDX, see Adobe LiveCycle DDX reference guide)
• Source documents
• Access to the running instance of Adobe LiveCycle

You can write a custom DDX document suited to your requirements.  Some of the most commonly requested DDX are:

DDX for splitting PDF document using bookmarks

In the following sample DDX, LiveCycle Assembler service generates a single document for each level 1 bookmark in the source document (AssemblerResultPDF.pdf in this example). The Assembler service generates a name for each document that is the concatenation of the following items:

• A string specified by the prefix attribute
• A 6-digit sequence number (This number could be used to re-create the original order of the pages after the document is disassembled.)
• The bookmark title
• The filename extension .pdf

<PDFsFromBookmarks prefix="stmt">
<PDF source="doc1.pdf"/>
</PDFsFromBookmarks>

DDX for splitting PDF document using page numbers

In this sample DDX, LiveCycle Assembler service generates documents for the mentioned page number from the source document. The Assembler service generates a name for each document based on the result parameter specified in the DDX.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<DDX xmlns="http://ns.adobe.com/DDX/1.0/">
<PDF result="Final.pdf">
<PDF source="PDF1.pdf" pages="1"/>
</PDF>
<PDF result="Final2.pdf">
<PDF source="PDF1.pdf" pages="2"/>
</PDF>
</DDX>

DDX for splitting PDF document using the page range

In this sample DDX, LiveCycle Assembler service generates documents for the mentioned range of the pages. The Assembler service generates a name for each document based on the result parameter specified in the DDX.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<DDX xmlns="http://ns.adobe.com/DDX/1.0/">
<PDF result="Final.pdf">
<PDF source="PDF1.pdf" pages="1-5"/>
</PDF>
</DDX>

DDX for splitting PDF documents using page range from different PDF documents and creating a single resultant PDF document

In the following sample DDX, LiveCycle Assembler service extracts pages from multiple documents as per the range of pages mentioned in the DDX and generates a single output document

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<DDX xmlns="http://ns.adobe.com/DDX/1.0/">
<PDF result="Final.pdf">
<PDF source="PDF1.pdf" pages="1-3"/>
<PDF source="PDF2.pdf" pages="4-5"/>
</PDF>
</DDX>

Sample program to split a PDF document
Let us write a simple Java program to split a PDF document into multiple documents.   To download the resources used in this sample program, click here.

Complete the following steps:

1. Create a new file and add the following code  to the file
<DDX xmlns="http://ns.adobe.com/DDX/1.0/">
<PDFsFromBookmarks prefix="Readme">
<PDF source="AssemblerResultPDF.pdf"/>
</PDFsFromBookmarks>
</DDX>
   For this example, save the XML file as shell_disassemble.xml.
2. Create a new Java project and add shell_disassemble.xml to the project.
3. Add the following libraries to your project. These libraries are required to invoke assembler service in SOAP mode:
   • adobe-assembler-client.jar
   • adobe-livecycle-client.jar
   • adobe-usermanager-client.jar
   • adobe-utilities.jar
   • jbossall-client.jar (use a different JAR file if LiveCycle ES is not deployed on JBoss)
   • activation.jar
   • axis.jar
   • commons-codec-..jar
   • commons-collections-..jar
   • commons-discovery.jar
   • commons-logging.jar
   • dom-xml-apis-.jar
   • jaxen-.-beta-jar
   • jaxrpc.jar
   • log4j.jar
   • mail.jar
   • saaj.jar
   • wsdl4j.jar
   • xalan.jar
     
   • xbean.jar
   • xercesImpl.jar
4. Create a new class named DisassemblePDFSOAP .
5. Add the source PDF file to the project. I have used AssemblerResultPDF.pdf
6. Add following code to the class:
   import com.adobe.livecycle.assembler.client.*;
   import java.util.*;
   import java.io.InputStream;
   import java.io.*;
   import com.adobe.idp.Document;
   import com.adobe.idp.dsc.clientsdk.ServiceClientFactory;
   import com.adobe.idp.dsc.clientsdk.ServiceClientFactoryProperties;
   public class DisassemblePDFSOAP
   {
   public static void main (String args[]) {
   Document outDoc = null;
   try{
   //Set connection properties required to invoke LiveCycle ES2
   Properties connectionProps = new Properties();
   connectionProps.setProperty(ServiceClientFactoryProperties.DSC_DEFAULT_SOAP_ENDPOINT, “http://10.40.18.95:8080″);
   connectionProps.setProperty(ServiceClientFactoryProperties.DSC_TRANSPORT_PROTOCOL,ServiceClientFactoryProperties.DSC_SOAP_PROTOCOL);
   connectionProps.setProperty(ServiceClientFactoryProperties.DSC_SERVER_TYPE, “JBoss”);
   connectionProps.setProperty(ServiceClientFactoryProperties.DSC_CREDENTIAL_USERNAME, “administrator”);
   connectionProps.setProperty(ServiceClientFactoryProperties.DSC_CREDENTIAL_PASSWORD, “password”);//Create a ServiceClientFactory instance
   ServiceClientFactory myFactory = ServiceClientFactory.createInstance(connectionProps);//Create an AssemblerServiceClient object
   AssemblerServiceClient assemblerClient = new AssemblerServiceClient(myFactory);FileInputStream myDDXFile = new FileInputStream(“E:\\workspace\\disassemble\\src\\shell_disassemble.xml”);
   //Create a Document object based on the DDX file
   Document myDDX = new Document(myDDXFile);//Create a Map object to store PDF source documents
   Map inputs = new HashMap();FileInputStream mySourceMap = new FileInputStream(“E:\\workspace\\backup\\disassemble\\src\\AssemblerResultPDF.pdf”);//Create a Document object based on the map.pdf source file
   Document myPDFSource = new Document(mySourceMap);//Place two entries into the Map object
   inputs.put(“AssemblerResultPDF.pdf”,myPDFSource);//Create an AssemblerOptionsSpec object
   AssemblerOptionSpec assemblerSpec = new AssemblerOptionSpec();
   assemblerSpec.setFailOnError(false);//Submit the job to the Assembler service
   AssemblerResult jobResult = assemblerClient.invokeDDX(myDDX,inputs,assemblerSpec);
   java.util.Map allDocs = jobResult.getDocuments();

   //Retrieve the result PDF documents from the Map object

   int index = 0;

   //Iterate through the map object to retrieve the result PDF document
   for (Iterator i = allDocs.entrySet().iterator(); i.hasNext();) {
   // Retrieve the Map object’s value

   Map.Entry e = (Map.Entry)i.next();
   if (index == 0)
   {
   Object o = e.getValue();

   //Cast the Object to a Document
   //and save to a file
   outDoc = (Document)o;
   File myOutFile = new File(“E:\\disassemble\\SplitPDF”+index +”.pdf”);
   outDoc.copyToFile(myOutFile);
   }
   index++;
   }
   if (index > 0)
   System.out.println(“The PDF document was disassembled into “+index+” PDF documents.”);
   else
   System.out.println(“The PDF document was not disassembled.”);

   }catch (Exception e) {
   System.out.println(“Error OCCURRED: “+e.getMessage());
   e.printStackTrace();
   }
   }
   }

7. Modify the locations mentioned in the sample code according to the file paths in your machine
8. Run the code.
9. The code splits the file into multiple PDF documents based on the bookmarks or the page numbers specified in the DDX.

This is first blog in the series of the blogs about programmatically splitting the PDF document. In this blog I have shared sample code to split PDF document using bookmarks. In the follow-up blogs, I will include sample code to split PDF documents using:

• Page numbers
• Page range
• Pages from different PDF documents and generate a single output document

Issue

On WebSphere, errors are encountered on attempting to interact with a service managed by the Livecycle DSC container. The service is unexpectedly shown as inactive in the Livecycle administration console. Examination of the server logs (SystemOut.log) shows that the service failed to start due to class-loading issues (ClassNotFoundException errors).

Reason

The issue occurs as a result of a file-lock which prevents the DSC container from properly extracting the class files required by the DSC class-loader to a temporary directory on the local file-system. To confirm that this is the case, note the time-stamp of the ClassNotFoundException error thrown during service startup in the WAS SystemOut.log and then check that the WAS SystemErr.log contains warning messages of the form ‘The process cannot access this file because it is being used by another process’ around the same time.

Solution

To remove the lock, shut down the server and periodically try to manually delete the file for which the file-lock warning is appearing in SystemErr.log (the log file should contain the complete path of the file) . If the deletion succeeds within a reasonable amount of time, start the server and check that things are fine. If the file continues to stay locked for a long period of time, try restarting the machine.

If you are working with accessible forms, you will find the following official resources very useful:

• LC accessibility Overview
• Voluntary Product Accessibility Template for Designer
• Accessibility best practices for Adobe LiveCycle Designer (PDF)
• Video tutorial on building accessible LiveCycle Forms
• Documentation about creating accessible forms

In Debugging LiveCycle – Working with logs (part 1), we covered how to handle logs at application server level. In this blog, we will cover a few areas where we can fine tune the logging in applications itself.

 LCM Logs

As you might have noticed LCM logs are found at <LiveCycle Installation Location>/configurationManager/log. Default logging level of this is INFO. This is governed by properties file kept inside adobe-lcm.jar: \com\adobe\livecycle\lcm\logging\log.properties.

Using this property file, you can:

• Change Logging Level
• Define file location and file name.
• Define rotation policy

If you want to overwrite the default location of this file to a more convenient location, you can do so by modifying <LiveCycle Installation Location>/configurationManager/bin/ConfigurationManager.bat and specifying following system property:

-Djava.util.logging.config.file=<path to file>

 Generating ORB Trace

While working with natives like XMLForms, you can sometimes run into issues where an application abnormally terminates. Following parameters help in generating extra trace information for debugging such issues.

These are required to be placed as argument to the native application:

-ORBtraceLevel 25 -ORBtraceThreadId 1 -ORBtraceInvocations 1 -ORBtraceInvocationReturns 1 -ORBtraceTime 1 –ORBtraceFile <Path to log file>

Also, when we are debugging an issue related to native applications, in System Out logs we can find system natives being invoked and a large IOR is passed to them as input. This IOR can be analyzed by many easily available IOR parsers. (Just Google for them). This can be first step towards debugging natives related problem.

Variable Logging

In order to better understand and debug an orchestration, LiveCycle offers excellent process debug feature. Using workbench, one can easily trace every step of a process and find what exact values any variable hold. For more information, one can refer this blog.

http://blogs.adobe.com/shwetank/2011/11/21/process-recording-feature-of-livecycle-workbench/

But sometimes this gets difficult due to environment constraints and performance overheads. One may want to introduce a step which will log current state of all variables in either System Out log or the log of your choice.

This can be accomplished using Variable Logger service. One can introduce this while designing the orchestration. Now each time the orchestration runs, the values of variables will be logged as the step is executed.

Other Application Logging Locations

Content Services and CMSA Logs

Content Services and CMSA logs are created in working directory of the application server.

LiveCycle Installer Logs

Installer logs can be found in following two locations

• <LiveCycle Installation Home>
• <LiveCycle Installation Home>/logs

Service Pack Logs

Service pack logs can be found at <LiveCycle Installation Home>/patch/<Patch Name>/log

CRX and Correspondence Management Logs

From ES3 onwards, you will find CRX and CM logs at <CRX Repository Directory>/logs. (More on this will be covered in next part of blogs)

PDFG Configuration Logs

• PDFG System Readiness Testing Logs:  <LiveCycle Installation Home>/pdfg_srt/reports
• PDFG Config Logs: <LiveCycle Installation Home>/logs

The following lists the common configuration errors, why they occur, and steps to troubleshoot them.

• Error: Component: com.adobe.xxx version: 10.0.3.20120511.1.316647 introduced a new service, it should not be patched
  Reason: This issue generally occurs when order of operation in Configuration Manager is incorrect after applying a patch. That is, the deployment of the component is performed before configuring and deploying of the EAR files. It usually occurs in command line execution because each step is run separately in this mode.
  Workaround: Re-run the Configuration Manager and ensure that configuration and deployment of ear is done before deploying components.

• Error: In case of Weblogic, a “null” folder gets created after deploying EARs.
  Workaround: Stop the managed-server first, followed by the node manager, and finally stop the admin-server. Restart them in reverse order. You will see a folder Adobe gets created in the Weblogic domain.

• Error: The following error occurred while executing this line: java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space
  Reason:  This issue generally occurs if the XMX setting is missing from the server configuration.
  Workaround:  Increase the XMX value for the server or restart the server, and re-run Configuration Manager.

• Error: weblogic.management.NoAccessRuntimeException: Access not allowed for subject: principals=[], on Resource AdobeService Operation: set , Target: EnableSSL at com.adobe.livecycle.bootstrap.bootstrappers.CoreBootstrapper.bootstrap(CoreBootstrapper.java:60)
  Reason:  This error generally occurs due to missing JMX policies in case of Weblogic during the Initialize LiveCycle step of the Configuration Manager.
  Workaround: Configure JMX as described in Creating JMX policies for database initialization. Restart the server and re-run the Initialize LiveCycle step.

LiveCycle Data Services 4.6 provides a HTML5/JavaScript library that lets you develop client applications that call remoting destinations in Data Services using plain HTML and JavaScript with no Adobe Flash involved.

You can use the JavaScript APIs that do not require compilation against services-config.xml. Remoting only needs destination-to-channel mapping, and the channel information (URL, ID) from services-config.xml. Therefore, instead of compiling against the services-config.xml, you create your own ChannelSet, and assign a component (RemoteObject) before using the component. Alternatively, if your browser supports the HTML5 WebSockets, you can use a WebSocket channel, instead of a RTMP channel in Flash, for real-time communication.

1. Set up the channel(s).
   var channel = new flex.client.channels.Channel("my-amf","http://localhost:8400/RemotingHtmlLcdsApp/messagebroker/amf");
var amfChannel = new flex.client.channels.Channel("my-nio-amf","http://localhost:2080/nioamf","flex.client.channels.Channel.HttpMode.REGULAR");
var wsChannel = new flex.client.channels.Channel("my-nio-amf-websocket","ws://localhost:2080/nioamfwebsocket");
2. Create a channel set.
   var channelSet = new flex.client.channels.ChannelSet([ channel,amfChannel ]);
3. Create and initialize a RemoteObject with channelSet and destinationId.
   var remoteObject = new flex.client.rpc.remoting.RemoteObject("EchoService");
remoteObject.setChannelSet(channelSet);
4. Add the result and fault handlers for the remoteObject.
   remoteObject.addEventListener(flex.client.rpc.events.ResultEvent.RESULT, function(resultEvent) {
result = resultEvent.getResult();
alert(result);
});
remoteObject.addEventListener(flex.client.rpc.events.FaultEvent.FAULT, function(faultEvent) {
var fault = faultEvent.getFaultString();
alert(fault);
});
5. Make the remoting call and call the disconnect on remoteObject.
   remoteObject.invoke("echo");
remoteObject.disconnect();

Download the sample code from here. Access the JavaScript reference here.

Adobe  LiveCycle deployment involves many third-party software like Application Servers, Databases and Operating Systems. LiveCycle team certifies certain platform combinations for each release of LiveCycle. For example, the supported platform combinations for our latest LiveCycle ES3 SP1 offering can be looked at http://help.adobe.com/en_US/livecycle/10.0/supported_platforms.html. It provides details of third-party software along with the version details on which LiveCycle is certified and supported. Given that these third party software keep coming up with their latest offerings too, LiveCycle has a third party software patch support statement available at http://helpx.adobe.com/livecycle/kb/livecycle-third-party-software-patch.html.

Together, these two documents should help you figure out whether platform of your choice is supported by LiveCycle or not. In case, you need any clarification, contact Adobe Enterprise Support for guidance.

If you find that platform of your choice is not supported by LiveCycle, for example, you wish support for version X of a database vendor due to your project considerations while LiveCycle supports version Y, you should contact Adobe Enterprise Support who can guide you on next steps.

In addition, Adobe LiveCycle team has a process known as Customer Commit Request in which such a request can be routed to engineering for evaluation if the customer has committed to using LiveCycle by means of purchase or M&S. If engineering finds that there is feasibility to support such a platform for your identified use, it carries out testing on that platform for your use case on LiveCycle version you intend to use. If all goes well, LiveCycle team reverts back in positive and provides support to you for your specific requirement on your desired platform for that LiveCycle release.

Logs are the first thing that come to the mind when we run into an issue. Following are some tips on improving the logging on the application side as well as the application server side.

Enabling/Modifying Logging of Application Servers

JBoss

Jboss, which is bundled with LiveCycle has a pre-configured log4j configuration file. It is present as <Appserver Home>/server/<profile>/conf/jboss-log4j.xml. you can track new packages or existing packages at debug level by simply using the following command:

<category name=”com.adobe.mypackage”>

<priority value=”DEBUG”/>

</category>

From here, you can do the following configurations:

• Change log file path
• Change log entry structure
• Specifying log rotation policy
• Enable cluster logging

The following JBoss wiki can help you play around the logging file.

https://community.jboss.org/wiki/Logging

Weblogic

Weblogic logging can be configured from Weblogic administration console. There are separate administration consoles for each managed server. On Weblogic administration console, logging can be accessed at Environment > Servers > [Name of Managed Server or Admin Server] > Logging.

Here, you can define following configurations

• Log file path
• Rotation Policy

However, in the advanced section, you can define:

• Log entry layout
• Logging Level
• Specify package level logging in “Logger Severity Properties” box:
  com.adobe.mypackage=Debug

Note that on Weblogic, if you are running into issues while deploying EARs, you may want to look into Domain logs and Adminserver logs. Both of these are created under <Weblogic Domain>/servers/<Admin Server>/logs.

Websphere

Websphere logs can be found at <Websphere Home>/AppServer/profiles/<Profile Name>/logs/<server name>. You can configure it from Websphere administration console at Websphere Application Servers > [name of server] > Logging and Tracing.

In JVM Logs, you can configure SystemOut and SystemErr logs for your server.

Here, you can configure:

• Location of Log file
• Rotation Policy

From Logging and Tracing, with few simple steps, you can enable the trace level logging for a specific package:

1. Select “Change Log Detail Levels” from General Properties section.
2. Under “Change Log Detail Levels” page, you can find a text box and tree beneath it with root node as “* [All Components] “.
3. Expand Root node “* [All Components] > com.adobe.livecycle.*” and click “com.adobe.mypackage.*”.
4. This will open a context menu. Go to Message and Trace Levels and choose finest from sub menu.
5. Click Apply button and Save the settings to master configuration. Now you should be back to “Logging and tracing”.
6. Select Diagnostic Trace link. This will open Diagnostic Trace Service page.
7. Make sure File radio button is selected. Increase the Maximum File Size to 50 MB, and Maximum Number of Historical Files to 5.
8. File Name text box shows “${SERVER_LOG_ROOT}/trace.log” by default. This means trace logs are getting created at default logs folder. You can change it by giving any absolute path where you want diagnostic logs to be written.
9. Click Apply and Save the settings to master configuration.
10. Restart the server. File specified at step 8 should get created.