by John Brinkman
Created
March 12, 2010
Last year I posted a sample form that was useful for debugging the internals of dynamic forms: Debug merge and layout. In the mean time, I’ve discovered a couple bugs. Time for a maintenance release. The main changes are:
- Does a better job finding the coordinates of objects — anything inside a subformSet, fields inside exclusion groups.
- Reports the breakBefore and breakAfter properties correctly
- General code cleanup and a bit of optimization
As I’ve mentioned before — this tool is useful not only as a way to debug your merge/layout, but also a good way to visualize what’s going on inside the the XFA processor.
Here’s the updated debugger form.

Hi John,I’m asked on a regular basis if it’s possible to get an information where a text is truncated within a field if it is longer than the visual boundaries of the field, but within the limits of the field size. A visual hint is the black ‘+’ at the lower right hand corner of the field.Kind regardsMaruan
Maruan:Unfortunately, I don’t know of any way to use script properties to detect when field content has exceeded a fixed size.Of course, life is simpler if you use a growable field that expands to the size of the data.But I suspect you knew that already and have other reasons for using a fixed-size field.John
John:thank you for the information. At least it confirms what I already thought which is also very valuable.Thank you very much for your ongoing support.Maruan
Dear John,I’m not sure this is the right place to ask my question, but i need help on this:My problem is – when I submit a PDF Form to Email as XML file I get an XML file name with the pdf file name + the suffix _data (if the adobe reader is in English) or with the suffix _datos (if the adobe reader is in Spanish)How can I change that? Is there a way to control the XML File name? or to embed it?Thank you in advance,Eran
Eran:I’m not the expert in this particular area.As far as I know, there is no way to control the actual name of the file that gets attached.John