Form Nation

A great new blog is now available from the Form Guide team at Adobe.  This blog will contain contributions from many memebers of the form guide team as they discuss tips, tricks and best practices concerning Form Guides.

The team is also looking for questions and suggestions from those early adoptors out there already using Form Guides to help guide future postings so be sure to provide lots of comments.

http://blogs.adobe.com/lcformguides/

technorati tags:lcformguides

Blogged with Flock

Posted by Anthony Rumsey at 12:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Did you know that the Guide Builder tool included with LiveCycle Designer not only supports drag and drop from the Designer canvas but also from the file system?

I'll start with drag and drop with LiveCycle Designer.  In Guide Builder the form hierarchy is provided to allow a user to pick form objects that they wish to appear in their form guide. While this hierarchy provides a quick way to see all the objects on a form they may not be easy to find particularily on a larger form.  In these cases it may be easier to pick objects directly from the design view canvas in LiveCycle Designer.  With Guide Builder running switch back to Designer and pick the fields you want to include in your form guide.  Next, drag and drop these fields on top of Guide Builder.  When a panel is selected these fields will be automatically added to that panel otherwise a dialog will appear asking you where you would like the fields to be placed.

If that wasn't cool enough Guide Builder also supports SWC, CSS, XML and XDP file types being dragged form the file system.  How each of these files is handled depends on what view Guide Builder is currently in. 

When in the Edit Guide view any guide definitions found in XML or XDP files will be imported into the current guide.  Any SWC files that are dropped onto Guide Builder will be added as custom library components for the currently selected guide.

When in the Customize Appearance view any SWC or CSS files that are dropped onto Guide Builder will be used as a custom style for the currently selected guide.

For more information on using Guide Builder look up Using Guide Builder in the LiveCycle Designer ES Help.

technorati tags:guide builder

Blogged with Flock

Posted by Anthony Rumsey at 12:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

LiveCycle ES has now been out on the market for just over six months.  This means people are finally starting to get their feet wet and are looking at form guides as a possible solution to create engaging data capture applications.  As a result I been getting more requests lately on how one should actually get started creating a form guide.  For those just getting started there is a fiar amount of documentation already available online that is worth reading.

1. Using Guide Builder (LiveDocs)
   • The LiveCycle ES Designer documentation contains a whole section on how to use Guide Builder
2. Getting Started With Form Guides (PDF)
   • This is a great document that provides an overview of form guides, walks through creating a new form guide and touches on customization.
3. Customizing Form Guides (PDF)
   • If you are really interested in creating custom form guide components this is the document for you!  This document provides information about creating customized guide layouts, panel layouts and controls using Flex Builder. This is also the place to go if you want to learn about taking advantage of the built in styling capabilities of form guides.

While these documents are great starting point for your form guide solution development over the next few months I will be posting additional articles that cover some of the holes and more difficult aspects of creating form guides.  If you have specific questions feel free to leave a comment and I'll do my best to address it.

Posted by Anthony Rumsey at 01:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There is only a little over a week to go before Adobe's biggest developer conference ever kicks off and I will be presenting there once again this year.

Adobe MAX 2007 is taking place in Chicago this year from September 30 to October 3. This year's conference is shaping up to be bigger and better in all aspects than any previous year. If you are a developer using any of Adobe's products this is definately the must attend event of the year.

If you are already planning to attend MAX I would like to point out some of the exciting sessions being presented around the LiveCycle suite of products.

First, I will plug my own session that will cover LiveCycle Forms ES and its new form guide feature. Over the past year I have been on the form guide team in Ottawa busily creating a tool for LiveCycle Designer ES called Guide Builder. This tool is a Flex-based desktop application that provides an extremely easy interface for creating dynamic and interactive form guides. Without giving too much away I am really excited to talk about this cool new feature and how it leverages the best of PDF and Flex technologies. Please come by one of my two sessions to learn more about LiveCycle Forms and form guides and be sure to say "hi" as well!

• Monday, October 1 4:30 pm - 5:30 pm (room #177)
• Wednesday, October 3 4:15 pm - 5:15 pm (room #177)

So, what else should you do while at MAX? If you are interested in learning more about LiveCycle here are a few sessions I think will be invaluable.