Bulk data management from LiveCycle forms

[Former Community Member]

Hello all,



My company and its customers use a form designed in LiveCycle to collect some XML data from suppliers that we can then organize and deal with. The problem is that many people involved in the data gathering get a considerable number of these forms at a time and need to extract the XML data. As it is, the only solution seems to be open each document in either Adobe Reader or Adobe Acrobat, export the XML data of the form, repeat this cycle.



The problem with this is that Reader and Acrobat are both slow to load and processing 50 documents can take quite some time. Furthermore, because it is a LiveCycle form, we cannot use Acrobat to merge them into an Excel sheet and process from there. We are quickly running thin on quick solutions for this problem.



Is there any thing within the Adobe products I have missed? Perhaps a third party solution is available? We have people who could personally write a solution if there is a development kit that would be able to address this problem and maintain the data in the XML Schema attached to the form. Ideas would be greatly appreciated.

[Former Community Member]

Vincent,



Did you ever find anything on your question? My need is similar and I haven't located anything yet. I wish to email the form out to people then when they submit it have the data go into a Coldfusion page that will write it into an Access database.

[Former Community Member]

Hi Graham,



I'm afraid not. Looking at the Adobe Livecycle file in a plain text editor it is not as straightforward as a standard PDF and I haven't found any development kits that do the job. If you happen to find a solution let me know, I am still very interested in this problem and I have moved to other areas of my project while looking for a solution and asking in various places.

[Former Community Member]

Vincent,



I've been investigating the abilities of CF to take XML data and parse it. There are several ways but it doesn't look extremely simple to me. But at least we know it's possible. Are you or can you use CF?

[Former Community Member]

Graham,



I have heard similar things, but unfortunately, we don't have Coldfusion available in house and I am yet to manage to get any momentum behind software acquisition of any kind so I would say it is unlikely that we will be getting it. Particularly since we already have a large list of software we really should have before Colfusion. Ideally, as there is a Schema against which the form checks, I should be able to find the fields corresponding to the Schema elements somehow, but other than writing my own parser for the entire document I haven't found a good solution.