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GSUIntern
Registered: Sep 8 2008
Posts: 15
Answered

Hi all,

I need users (students filling out forms) to fill out a form created in livecycle.
I need them to press a button and submit the form to my department. Email submit will not work because students use various webmail accounts not outlook etc. After the form is recieved from the student it must be signed digitally by staff members across campus. I assume I should be able to use email attachments or distribute of some sort to do this.

What I need to know is:

How can I recieve the filled out form(without signatures) from the students without using email submit?

Once I recieve this.. will I be able to send out copies of the filled form to recieve signatures and have them compiled on one form in the end to store the pdf for documentation.

Hopefully this makes some sort of sense. I am trying to create fillable forms for the college of graduate studies at Georgia Southern University. I chose livecycle for its ability to handle signatures.

Any help would be GREATLY apreciated.

Thanks

My Product Information:
LiveCycle Designer, Windows
riccarrasquilla
Registered: Sep 24 2008
Posts: 27
i ran into a similar dilemma. in my case, joe web user had to fill out a form and submit it. joe could be using hot mail, yahoo, outlook, etc.

my workaround was to submit the page to an asp page that parses the form collection. from that process page, an asp script emails me with the pdf form information embedded in the email.

also, i reply back to joe via the script and ask him to send me the completed pdf.

it's not the most direct way to process a form, but it's a decent workaround. if you're interested, i can help out with the code if you like.
thomp
Expert
Registered: Feb 15 2006
Posts: 4411
Form data submitted by HTTP is intended to be recieved by a script on the server. There is a large number of server side scrpting technologies, ASP, ASP.NET, PHP, ColdFusion, Java, Perl, and the list goes on. Any of these will work for recieving and processing the PDF data. In fact, Adobe provides an FDF toolkit for building server side scripts to process FDF data submitted by Acrobat. And ColdFusion has PDF form processing buit-in. There are also 3rd party server side tools for handling PDF data.

There are 3rd party services and server products like www.formrouter.com and UltimatePDF from www.techedsolutions.com. I've also heard that the new www.acrobat.com site will handle form data, but I haven't checked it out and don't know how this works, but I think it's free right now.

So you have a number of options, most require that you spend either time or money.

Thom Parker
The source for PDF Scripting Info
[url=http://www.pdfScripting.com]pdfscripting.com[/url]

The Acrobat JavaScript Reference, Use it Early and Often
[url=http://www.adobe.com/devnet/acrobat/]http://www.adobe.com/devnet/acrobat/[/url]

Thom Parker
The source for PDF Scripting Info
www.pdfscripting.com
Very Important - How to Debug Your Script

GSUIntern
Registered: Sep 8 2008
Posts: 15
So how could I benefit from having a livecycle server. Or could I? Sorry I am still figuring all this out. I am unsure of exactly how hacing a livecycle server could help out here. That is the original intent of my project, but in the mean time Im having to work with what I have. If I make no sense, then give me some sense.

Thanks
GSUIntern
Registered: Sep 8 2008
Posts: 15
Does anyone know of any examples of an e-forms solution someone has implemented using livecycle forms where client users have submitted forms wiht digital signatures?
riccarrasquilla
Registered: Sep 24 2008
Posts: 27
I've developed a few forms in livecycle I could have developed in acrobat. From my understanding, simple and interactive forms can be developed in Acrobat. Unless you require dynamic and/or data-connected forms, I'd use Acrobat.
thomp
Expert
Registered: Feb 15 2006
Posts: 4411
There are several LiveCycle Servers. Each does some server side PDF/workflow related task. There are servers for building forms, routing forms, applying Reader Rights, and a server for processing form data. These servers are big, expensive, and usually over kill. For a fraction of the price of any one of these servers you could pay a developer to write a server scrpt for your purpose. Of course you wouldn't get the wonderful long term Adobe mantinance.

Mr. riccarrasquilla has a brilliant setup, send the form to a server script, which then emails the form to you. Very short, to the point, with minimal server side activity.

Thom Parker
The source for PDF Scripting Info
[url=http://www.pdfScripting.com]pdfscripting.com[/url]

The Acrobat JavaScript Reference, Use it Early and Often
[url=http://www.adobe.com/devnet/acrobat/]http://www.adobe.com/devnet/acrobat/[/url]

Thom Parker
The source for PDF Scripting Info
www.pdfscripting.com
Very Important - How to Debug Your Script