These forums are now Read Only. If you have an Acrobat question, ask questions and get help from one of our experts.

Reader 8 vs Read Only commands

R_Boyd
Registered: Nov 1 2007
Posts: 151
Answered

Grrrr...this little quirk has wasted an hour of my life.

In Reader 7.0 and the preview option of Designer 7.0 you cannot click on a Read Only field.

In Reader 8.0 you can but you can't add text. This has meant that when testing to see whether a field was read only by trying to click into it it gave the appearance of being an edit field!

Beware or at least ensure that if you test this type of thing you do so by trying to type in the field as well!

My concern is that users will see a blinking cursor in a read only field and assume that this means that they should be able to enter content. Is this a bug or a 'design feature'?!

My Product Information:
LiveCycle Designer, Windows
Helen_Dyksley
Registered: Jun 4 2007
Posts: 27
I ran into the same problem. According to Adobe this was changed in Designer 8 for accessibility reasons (screen reader use). Tthey considered this to be a 'bug' in 7.1. If you do not want the cursor to enter the ReadOnly field, you have to write JS code and make the field protected rather than readOnly.
R_Boyd
Registered: Nov 1 2007
Posts: 151
I tried a workaround using $.fillcolor to try and flag to the user that the field is not open but I can't get it to just apply to the VALUE part of the field.

Is this possible?
sconforms
Expert
Registered: Jul 10 2007
Posts: 92
R_Boyd,

Fields have two borders: The first represents the field's nominal extent which includes the caption. That's set via "MyField.border..." and "$.fillColor" is a shortcut to "MyField.border.fill.color.value". The second, the UI Border, represents only the content area of the field, that is, where the user inputs data. You can access this one via "MyField.ui.oneOfChild.border" and hence set the content area fill color with "MyField.ui.oneOfChild.border.fill.color.value".

Stefan Cameron obtained his bachelor's degree with Honors in Computer Science at the University of Ottawa and is a Computer Scientist working on Adobe's LiveCycle server products, in particular on LiveCycle Designer ES for the past 5 years.