access="nonInteractive" in Designer

[Former Community Member]

The XFA spec allows a field to have access="nonInteractive", but doesn't seem to be a way to set this within the Designer interface without resorting to hand-modifying the XML in the XML View.



I'm regularly running into scenarios where setting to using access="nonInteractive" is useful. The most common one is where I'm generating what is essentially a static PDF with a signature field on it. Within Designer, I have to make all the fields read-only but that's not the same as making the fields nonInteractive. The PDF with read-only fields is larger that the corresponding nonInteractive one and any temp fields that are populated using calculations must either have their values stored in the data (meaning that I either have to alter my schema to include them or else generate data that doesn't conform to my primary schema) or set the calculations to be runAt="both" which could potentially invalidate the signature.



nonInteractive fields are useful and it seems that it wouldn't be a lot of work to add support for them into Designer. Is there something I'm missing? Why aren't they in Designer now? Will we see support for them in 8.1?



Regards,

Rob

4 Point Solutions

[Jared_Langdon]

Thanks for putting up this post, Rob. I had not known about the "nonInteractive" option for the access property. It's not the first time I've seen a property in the XFA spec that cannot be set using the Designer GUI. In fact, I've seen things in the spec that aren't implemented in Acrobat/Reader at all (i.e. you can edit the XML source directly and it still doesn't work).



From what I can tell, the "protected" option is also absent from the GUI. You can set it by editing the XML directly or by setting the property in its initialize event. The latter option allows you to create a reusable custom object. Presumably you could do the same with "nonInteractive".



Jared Langdon

[Former Community Member]

Hi Jared,



Using script is exactly what I ended up doing. We have a script that loops through all the fields and turns all the fields (with a couple of exceptions) into access="nonInteractive". Not very elegant but it seems to work.



You know after some thought, there are probably a number of attributes in Designer that are just drop down boxes that populate attributes in the XML. It would be nice of those sorts of things were externalized into a config file (.INI or some-such) so that they could be added to. It would help (in an admittedly very limited way) the different versions of Designer cope with the different versions of XFA. It would be some work for a Designer developer however it might also save development effort in the long run (future minor XFA changes might not always a code change and could perhaps be done by issuing a new config file).



Just a thought.



Regards,

Rob