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Enforcing field completion before submission/printing

Forum Index > Forms: Acrobat > Enforcing field completion before submission/printing
2009-01-30 08:12:27
hag
Registered: Jan 30 2009
Posts: 4

What is the best way to enforce users fill in required fields before printing a pdf. I currently have a pdf requesting programming services from non-tech people and they continually fail to fill in the important fields. Such as Requested Completion Date: Description of request: Name: Telephone number:

Our current policy ( state audit requirement ) is to have a supervisor sign the original request and send it to our department by courier. 85% of the requests are not filled out properly. We don't ask much: Who you are? What you want? When you want it? But even that seems to complex for our users.

So, again. Is there a way to enforce these fields have at least some sort of data before they can print the pdf? If so what is the "best practice" and any examples or example code would be appreciated.

Thank you,

William

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2009-01-30 09:55:40
#1
gkaiseril
Online
Expert
Registered: Feb 23 2006
Posts: 4308
Only to a limit. You can use the "Will Print" and "Will Save" actions to run a JavaScript prior to the action but you can not stop the action.

You can issue an alert and mark the form as incomplete, but the form will still print or save.

George Kaiser

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2009-01-30 10:21:21
#2
George_Johnson
Expert
Registered: Jul 6 2008
Posts: 1876
If it's that bad, you could set up the form so that only a message like "You knucklehead, this form is not sufficiently complete, so please complete fields." gets printed. In other words, what gets printed is obviously useless (but they'd still probably send it in). You can control this behavior with JavaScript (using layers/buttons, setting the "display" property of fields, etc.).A similar idea is to set up a field to display an "INCOMPLETE" type of status message that gets updated when a field value changes. The message would change or disappear when the form is sufficiently complete.

If you set up a big "Print" button, they may choose to use it instead of the print toolbar button or menu item. You could attach some code that does the validation and alerts the user. None of this is perfect, but you should be able to reduce that 85% number. Have you tried threatening their livelihoods?

George
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