Recently in Solution Accelerators Category

MAX 2009 ended last week. By all accounts, LiveCycle sessions experienced a hitherto unprecedented surge in interest with many getting sold out. For those that couldn't make it to MAX 2009 due to various reasons, here are links to those LiveCycle sessions that Adobe has published. For a list of all of the MAX sessions, see the MAX Session Locator.

1) What's New in LiveCycle ES2 (Marcel Boucher, Senior Product Manager, Adobe Technical Marketing) - Duration 0:56

2) Developing for Information Assurance with LiveCycle ES2 (Jonathan Herbach, Adobe Senior Product Manager) - Duration 0:57

3) How to Architect Adobe LiveCycle ES into Your Enterprise Solutions (Danny Saikaly, Technology Practice Leader for Adobe Professional Services) - Duration 1:14

4) Understanding the Building Blocks of Adobe's Solution Accelerator Program (Ashish Agrawal, Adobe Product Manager and Girish Bedekar, Adobe Solutions Accelerator Architect) - Duration 0:51

5) Enterprise Cloud Computing with Adobe LiveCycle Developer Express (David Tompkins, Chief Architect of LiveCycle Developer Express and Sven Claar, Adobe Advanced Technology Labs) - Duration 0:43

6) Effective Form Design for Developers (Angie Okamoto of Easel Solutions) - Duration 1:02

7) WCAG2 Compliance with PDF Forms (Charlie Pike of The Paciello Group) - Duration 0:58

8) PDF Inside and Out (Leonard Rosenthal, Adobe PDF Standards Architect) - Duration 1:08

9) High-Performance Real-Time Messaging with Flex and LiveCycle Data Services (Mete Atamel, Adobe Computer Scientist) - Duration 1:01

There are three new solution accelerators available that include production ready building block components and technical guides.

The new accelerators include solutions for Financial Services with Account Enrollment and Correspondence Management as well as a cross-industry Human Capital Applications solution.

For further information including technical documentation or to download the new releases, please visit http://www.adobe.com/devnet/livecycle/solution_accelerators.html.

A quick note to our readers who have been following the recent posts on Solution Accelerators: We have created a new LiveCycle Solution Accelerators blog dedicated entirely to these new product development kits from Adobe. Future SA-related articles will be posted there.

A colleague asked me an interesting question the other day as he was building another solution with the CM Aug 20 PDK: "How do I make sure this paragraph is included in my letter only if the user selects this other paragraph?"

The answer is quite simple, actually: Assuming the "other" paragraph is optional, just make the dependent paragraph conditional (by including the cmConditionalContent object in its CM Content subform) and set its condition to evaluate to "true" when the "other" paragraph's cmOptionalContent object is checked (it's a check box).

For example, if the "other" paragraph is sitting in a CM Content subform named "TheOtherParagraph", the condition script would look like this:

cmUtils.ConditionalContentInclusion(this, this.parent.parent.TheOtherParagraph.cmOptionalContent, "==", 1);

To make it work in your letter template, you should just need to replace "TheOtherParagraph" with the name of your CM Content subform.

As promised, here is the Letter Building Tutorial based on the August 20, 2008, release of the Correspondence Management Solution Accelerator PDK. I had previously indicated I was going to reveal this over a series of posts but I already had it all written-up in a nice document complete with screen shots and converting it to multiple posts just seemed like make-work. I'm sure you'll appreciate having the entire tutorial in a single, searchable document.

Software Requirements

To get started with Correspondence Management (CM), you will need the following (or better):

• CM PDK released on August 20, 2008
• AIR 1.0
• Flash Player 9.0.124.0
• LiveCycle Workbench ES 8.2
• LiveCycle Designer ES 8.2
• Acrobat 9.0 Pro
• Access to a LiveCycle ES Update 1 server running Forms and Workspace, along with any other LC services you may need for your own CM solutions

Tutorial

Download the tutorial [pdf]

Videos

Since videos can reveal even more details, here is a list of links to videos covering the following sections of the tutorial:

1. Installing the kit.
2. Installing and running the Custom Communications sample provided in the kit.
3. Setting-up for building the letter template.
4. Building the letter content (i.e. paragraphs) using the Content Creator tool.
5. Inspecting the base letter template and using it to create a new letter template for a specific solution.
6. Adding content to the letter template.
7. Testing the letter template using the debugging tools.
8. Building and running the Letter Filling Experience (a form guide designed to allow the user to choose content based on inclusion rules specified in the letter template).
9. Troubleshooting some common problems.

Note: In the videos, I point-out a possible bug in Workbench 8.2 related to broken fragment references in the cmBaseTemplate.xdp file. Upon further investigation, it looks like Workbench may not be the culprit after all (sorry guys!). This issue is still under investigation by the CM Team. Please use the workaround provided in the document/videos in the mean time.

There are some activities that all businesses need to do. Two of those are corresponding with customers and enrolling them into new services (they could be simple processes or they could be very complicated depending on various requirements). Adobe has recognized this need and has added a new segment to it’s LiveCycle Enterprise Suite called Solution Accelerators.

These Solution Accelerators come in the form of development kits that provide tools, built on top of LiveCycle ES, that are designed to help businesses, enterprises and government agencies quickly get started on a correspondence (eg. building letters and sending them to customers) and/or enrollment (eg. opening a new bank account) solution tailored to their business requirements.

For the past few months now, I’ve been working on the Correspondence Management Team at Adobe. We’re building some really cool tools that leverage many aspects of LiveCycle, Flex and AIR.

To get things started, I'll be posting a series of articles related to the Correspondence Management Solution Accelerator. They will show how to install the kit into your LiveCycle environment and then use it to build a new letter solution.

Stay tuned!