Hi Guvenc
One of the reasons why LiveCycle Workflow is such a brilliant product is that it is 100% extensible. Rather than try to build everything into the product (you can never achieve this, no matter how hard you try), Adobe gave us a bunch of core features, including all the PDF-specific QPACs, and some other core QPACs. They also gave us a very simple way of extending the product to do just about anything. So you can look at any workflow design, and have a very high level of confidence that you're going to be able to build it with Adobe Workflow, because if it doesn't do it with components in the box, you can either write your own or access the third-party market in components. In my opinion, this is the single most powerful feature of the Workflow Product - it's infinitely extensible.
In fact, you shouldn't assume that Adobe ships Workflow with everything you need to build any workflow you can imagine. The exact opposite is true - to build any moderately complex workflows, you almost undoubtably WILL need to either build or buy additional QPACs. This is not a negative - the fact that you can buy or build additional components is a huge benefit. All of the QPACs we've built (around 50 at last count) were built directly to solve some customer's requirements.
This is exactly like building user interfaces in Visual Basic or Delphi or Swing - there are some basic components that the vendor provides, but you can also write your own components, or buy components from third party vendors.
So you actually have several options:
- You can build your own QPAC to do the database query you need. (Adobe thoughtfully provide a QPAC Development Environment to help you doing this.)
- You can purchase the Avoka one.
- You can try to find some other way to solve your problem (although I'm not aware of any way).
I suspect that buying the Avoka QPAC will be substantially more cost-effective than trying to write your own - the SQLPlus QPAC is our most sophisticated QPAC, and represents many months of development work. But the decision is obviously yours.
I hope this helps...
Regards,
Howard
http://www.avoka.com