LiveCycle Doc team

Everyone is apologizing these days. Automakers in the US, financial institutions around the world, that guy who bumped into me in the lobby this morning. I figured it was my turn.

Allow me to explain, you see during the last full LiveCycle ES release (version 8.2), we had a dilemma in terms of our documentation for form guides. We weren’t sure how to handle the information related to customizing form guides using CSS. It seemed like customizing form guides using a CSS was something customers would like to do, but we didn’t have any concrete data to back that up. We didn’t know if customizing form guides using a CSS was a typical use-case. So, due to time constraints, we opted to drop the CSS material from the documentation in favor of beefing up the Customizing Form Guides Using Flex Builder document.

I’m sorry.

We still haven’t had any feedback that customizing using CSS is a very common situation, but it seems like it should be. I thought maybe people would find it simpler if I posted the default CSS files for each of the stock form guide layouts that come with Guide Builder (the form guide creation tool included with LiveCycle Designer ES). That way, if you want to create simple CSS customizations, you can just modify one of the CSS files in your favorite CSS editor, and then import it into Guide Builder. Voila!

We have some instructions on how to do the importing here: LiveCycle Designer ES Help. I’ve added some basic comments in the CSS files themselves indicating what aspect of the form guide the different CSS classes control.

Download files:

CobaltBar.css
CobaltStandard.css
CobaltTree.css
ButtonBar.css
LeftAccordion.css
LeftMultilevel.css
Workspace.css

I hope you find this useful.

Have a good day.

Posted by Alex Mitchell at 1:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Adobe LiveCycle ES provides a sample web application called Forms Installation Verification Sample (IVS). This sample is a web-based application that interacts with the Forms ES service to generate interactive PDF forms, HTML forms, and form guides that users can fill and submit. After you deploy the Forms IVS, you can use a web browser to render form designs created in LiveCycle Designer ES for testing purposes. Another use for the Forms IVS application is for debugging the forms in isolation from the rest of your LiveCycle ES application that was created in LiveCycle Workbench ES.

In the Forms IVS application, you can configure various parameters that are used from Forms service operations. You can choose the output that is rendered, such as XHTML files or PDF forms, and test various transformation options. If you are interested in customizing the appearance of HTML output, you can also generate a CSS file that you can customize and use in your application. As a convenience for testing the Forms service, the Forms IVS application is configured with sample form designs.

Try it

To get started, you need to deploy the application to the application server. The application is installed with Forms ES on the LiveCycle ES server:

[install location]/LiveCycle8.2/deploy/adobe-forms-ivs-[application server].ear.

For example, after installing LiveCycle ES on Windows for a JBoss application server, the file is C:\Adobe\ LiveCycle8.2\deploy\adobe-forms-ivs-jboss.ear. To deploy on JBoss, simply copy the file to the [Jboss home]/server/all/deploy directory (JBoss can be running when you copy the file).

Now, open a web browser, open the application, and configure authentication for the Forms service:

1. Go to the address http://server-name:port/FormsIVS. For Jboss, the default port number is 8080 and it is case-sensitive!


2. Click the Check/Change Your Preferences link. You can modify the following fields to point to custom form designs and data:
   
   • Content Root URI: This is the location where the form designs are stored.
   
   
   • Data URI: The location of the data files to merge with your form design.
   
   
   
   
3. In the Preferences web page, scroll to the bottom of the page and locate the Administrator User ID and Administrator Password fields, and type a user ID and password. The user ID and password you provide is used for executing the Forms service.


4. Click Save.

After clicking Save, the web page that renders the form design is loaded. Try testing a form design by configuring the following parameters:

After you click Use EJB to send the request, rendered form appears in your web browser. If you select PDFForm or PDFMerge, the PDF form is opened in your browser when you have Adobe Reader or Adobe Acrobat installed.

You can see these steps described in a video (no sound).

For More Information About How To Use Forms IVS

After you open the application in your web browser, click Help, which is located in the upper-right corner of the web page. All the information that you need for working with your own form designs and experimenting with transformations is there.

Posted by Gilbert Yu at 1:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

After running the standalone (non-Turnkey) JBoss LiveCycle ES Installer, you select the “Start LiveCycle Configuration Manager” option, but nothing happens. You then try to browse to the directory where you installed LiveCycle ES (e.g. D:\Adobe\LiveCycle8.2\configurationManager\bin), double-click the ConfigurationManager.bat file, and a Command Prompt window appears and closes in seconds. The LiveCycle Configuration Manager does not start. You check the log file (ConfigurationManager.000), but there are no log messages indicating the error.

Not sure what to do? Neither did I when I first encountered this situation. But, here is what you do:

1. Open a Command Prompt window and navigate to the LiveCycle Installation directory. For example, here is what I typed: cd D:\Adobe\LiveCycle8.2\configurationManager\bin

2. Next, type: ConfigurationManager.bat

You now see the error message that flashed in front of you before. It turned out that in my case I did not properly define the JAVA_HOME and PATH environment variables. For instructions on setting these variables, refer to the Installing LiveCycle ES documentation.

The reason the ConfigurationManager.000 log file is empty is because the LiveCycle Configuration Manager needs the JAVA_HOME variable defined before it will even start. If it cannot start, it cannot write to the log file.

Posted by Tyler Rushton at 2:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This is not an official Adobe endorsement.

There, I said it. Now that we have that out of the way, I thought I’d share a reference that I’ve come to respect over the last year or so.

http://formulate.com.au

I had the good fortune to meet Ms. Enders at the Business Forms Management Association (BFMA) symposium in Las Vegas last year. I was impressed by her presentation on form design techniques, not the least of which because it seemed like a topic that a lot of form design professionals at the symposium were eager to learn more about. In particular, check out Ms. Ender’s articles section (http://formulate.com.au/articles/). There’s a lot of good information in there that I think is worthwhile reading, for experienced form design professionals and newcomers alike.

Design, and design thinking, is really becoming integrated into all facets of business these days, and it only makes sense that it plays a large role in terms of how organizations implement form solutions. How best to capture user data, I learned at the symposium, is not something that is always well understood. Contemporary research into user behaviors and more effective design is often overlooked by form solutions, which really means that the poor individual who must fill out the form -- sometimes called a “customer” -- is left to suffer. Then, of course, it’s the organization that suffers through additional costs and inefficiencies associated with data entry errors.

Ms. Enders is just one of a number of people out there who are bringing some formal design principles and research to the form design space. If you have links to other sources that you have found useful, please comment directly to this blog and share. We’re always curious to know who our readers are reading, and I’m sure other readers would be interested to know as well.

Have a good day.

Posted by Alex Mitchell at 11:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

People sometimes ask what the difference is between Alfresco and Adobe LiveCycle Contentspace ES, so we thought posting a quick overview on the subject would be helpful.

LiveCycle ContentSpace ES is based on Alfresco 2.1 and offers full Alfresco functionality*, plus LiveCycle Content Services ES. Adobe added more service capabilities by extensively customizing the Alfresco user interface and by integrating various LiveCycle Content Services ES solution components.

Technically speaking, these are the key differences between Alfresco Enterprise Edition and LiveCycle Content Services ES:
- Web Content Management is not embedded or distributed.
- Replaced jBPM with LiveCycle Process Management ES.
- Replaced PDF libraries.
- Enhanced security to enable single sign-on (SSO) with other LiveCycle components such as Workspace and integration with Adobe User Management.
- Added support for the full LiveCycle ES 54 platform matrix including clustering/failover.
- Integrated LiveCycle ES solution components such as LiveCycle Workspace ES, LiveCycle Rights Management ES, and LiveCycle PDF Generator ES.

The key architecture of Alfresco in terms of Java APIs, ACPs, customized content models, actions, and so forth, are the same.

Using LiveCycle Contentspace ES, end users can manage the content through library services such as versioning, check-in/checkout, rights protecting, and archiving according to policies. Developers can also implement processes to enable end users to interact with content and automate procedures like document transformation and PDF generation, rights management, as well as workflows like data capture, and document review and approval.

Along with the Alfresco content management system capabilities, LiveCycle Content Services ES provides the following functionality.

Process automation

Content Services ES can leverage LiveCycle ES for business events by running processes based on content events, such as adding new documents to the repository. A process can also wait for content events to occur, such as a completed document review.

Users can perform the following tasks:
- Attach files, such as reports to a form, and submit the form. After the form is submitted, both the data and the attachments are saved, and can be opened and viewed in the same form layout.
- Access different form applications or content types in the same portal.
- Search and browse by association between processes and documents, and by process and document attributes.

Process initiation

Developers can run processes from LiveCycle Contentspace ES and leverage LiveCycle Workspace ES to review and approve content.

Form rendering

Developers can set up the following form rendering tasks:
- Pre-populate forms by using content or metadata.
- Render forms with attachments from Content Services ES.
- Update forms with a new version of assets referenced during run-time.
- Keep form template versions consistent during the life cycle of the process.

Information protection

Content Services ES can leverage LiveCycle Rights Management ES to automatically apply policies to content that is stored in the repository. Using Rights Management ES, organizations can protect PDF documents. The policies are applied transparently to content when users retrieve content from the repository and save it on the local file system, send content by email to someone who is external to the organization, or place content on devices such as USB keys.

Document output

Content Services ES has pre-built actions that developers can use to automatically convert documents to other formats (for example, from MS Word to PDF). Also, developers can configure actions to start short-lived processes for assembling a set of documents within a shared space into a package, generating PDF files from three-dimensional content, or converting content to PDF/A format for archiving.

* LiveCycle Contentspace ES does not utilize the Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) file server configuration capabilities of Alfresco.

Posted by Drew Brazil at 12:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here’s the list of Knowledge Base tech notes that the LiveCycle ES documentation team has published in the past month:

• Form guides containing custom components cannot preview in Guide Builder or render by using LiveCycle ES (8.2)
• Adobe LiveCycle Designer ES (8.2) included with Adobe Acrobat 9.0 does not include the flex-sdk-description.xml file
• JacORB modifications
• OmniORB modifications
• Updated information for upgrading client applications in LiveCycle ES from 7.x for WebLogic

Other LiveCycle ES teams (like Adobe Support) also publish tech notes. You can search the Knowledge Base for a complete list of tech notes that were published within the last few months.

Posted by Tasmina Patel at 2:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)