Autotab - is it possible?

[Former Community Member]

Does anyone know how to enable autotabbing between text fields for forms created using livecycle? I've tried a number of different scritps with no success.



Thanks in advance

[Former Community Member]

What is auto-tab? I keep seeing this mentioned.

[gkaiseril]

Auto-tab is a process where there is a field of finite length and when text is entered and when the number of characters has reached the limit of the field focus is moved to the next field. This was a custom key stroke script in Acrobat Forms and used before comb fields were introduced. But this code could be used for any length field besides an individual character. Fro example a form could have a 2 character U.S. state field and one could enter the 2 letter state abbreviation and the focus would change to the zip code field which could be 5 digits and after the 5 digit zip code was entered focus could go to the phone number and so on.



Although the original script was written for numeric entry there are variations that can handle alphabetic characters and optionaly capitalize the key strokes on input.

[Former Community Member]

I see now, of course. Here is how you can do it.



1) Create a blank form and add two text fields.

2) In TextField1, set the limit entry length to two characters.

3) In the TextField1 'full' event, add the following formcalc script:

xfa.host.setFocus("TextField2")



Now when you preview the form and enter more than 2 characters into the first text field, it will automatically jump to the next field. Unfortunately, it beeps and loses the 3rd character, but it works.

[Former Community Member]

Scott,



Thanks a million it worked !!!

[Former Community Member]

Is there a way to do this without the beep and the loss of the character to make for a smoother user interface?

[Former Community Member]

I am also looking for the answer to the autotab lost character problem!

Please post if you find the answer...

[Robert_Hirst]

Has anyone found a solution to this issue?



I'd really like to solve this... I'll keep trying things and if I figure anything out I'll post it here, although I'm giving up hope that it can be done without the 'beep'.

[Former Community Member]

I have also applied this technique and it does work but the extra character and the beep cancels out all of the gain by not having to tabulate to the next field. This also creates a much larger possibility of errors by my end users as the extra character that needs to be typed is what they automatically assume will go into the next field but does not. In my form I have a string of single character fields which are for bank numbers at the bottom of payable checks, so any mistake on this is disastrous to say the least.



It seems like there has got to be a way of doing this without the extra character issue or the beep. I'm thinking that it must be some type of "IF THEN" script, like in Excel, but I'll be damned if I can figure out how to do it exactly. The options are somewhat limited in the operations window of this program. It would be nice if I could find a "Live Cycle Bible" like you can buy for just about every other application on the market to give some specifics on all of this without being at the mercy of other users for some of these difficult problems, but that's another tough one as well. I purchased the Acrobat Bible and that only skims the surface of Live Cycle". If anyone out there has any thoughts on this please feel free to email me at: csharke1@maine.rr.com.



Thanks Craig

[nakmo]

I found this in another posting - hope it helps others - It worked for me



http://www.adobeforums.com/webx/.3bc0df31/4



Chris Trubiani - 6:36am Jul 13, 06 PST (#3 of 5)



Ok, so what you would need to do then is have a script on the change event on your fields, that tests the length of xfa.event.newText to see if it's the length you want, and if it is then call xfa.host.setFocus() to move focus to the next field. Something like:



if (xfa.event.newText.length == 2) {

xfa.host.setFocus("TextField2");

}



Chris

Adobe Enterprise Developer Support