Creating a Master Form

I see that no one apparently replied to your post of 2/22/10 until now. I am a lawyer with a common interest. I am developing a set of forms to process real estate transactions; been working on the process for quite some time. I have developed a master data entry form. It's a very dynamic, interactive form. I am now beginning the process of developing a set of secondary forms, my "work product" forms, that will utilize the data collected in the master form. In summary, the master form collects all of the data for the entire transaction and performs a number of mathematical calculations. I save the data to an FDF file and will import that data into the secondary forms, fielded with common field names.

I've been using a similar system created and refined over the last 15 years with WordPerfect form and data files. That system uses a single data file, dozens of forms that employ that data, and macros that merge the data with the forms. Using that system I can produce a number of documents in a few seconds. It's been a great system, but not something you could easily market or teach others to use. The new system with Acrobat pdf forms has some limitations (document assembly with flowing text and variable text/paragraphs/documents in response to field content), but in the end will be a great improvement, and can be easily used by others with almost no training time at all. Two other valuable aspects of the Acrobat forms: (1) the data can also be exported to an Excel spreadsheet, and thereby used as a data source for Word or WordPerfect merge forms employing common field names, as well as with Acrobat pdf forms; and (2) Acrobat is platform independent, i.e. can be used on both PCs and Macs.

Just to add another point of view to this: this is also possible within Acrobat itself, without any external applications like WordPerfect.
It's possible to script a PDF so that it will automatically access a database and retrieve (or write) information from it.
This requires quite a bit of scripting knowledge in both JavaScript and SQL, but it's possible.

And to clarify what I said earlier, my approach relies on 2 primary ingredients: (1) FDF files exported from my Acrobat "Master Form" and (2) a bank of fielded pdf forms that draw their data from the exported FDF files through the import fdf process.

With larger law firms and businesses, a central database is more desirable, and in accessing a central db in the manner the other contributor suggests, your script can also allow you to select a particular record in the database to retrieve into your form. With a solo practice I am very pleased with using individual FDF files as opposed to the database approach.

My comment with respect to Word and WordPerfect merge forms was to point out that they too can employ data exported from Acrobat to an Excel spreadsheet or a delimited txt file.