"Importing Data to Form" results in nothing (Newbie)

[Former Community Member]

Either I designed this form in Designer wrong, or there is some setting that is not allowing data to be saved even though it appears that I set it up correctly. I do have a Submit by E-mail button.



I have e-mailed the form to 3 people (via the Initiation steps) and they have completed it and sent the XML files back. Everything looks fine, all rules appear to have been followed. But when I try to import it into the form, nothing comes in for each of the 3 examples.



Is there some attribute I am failing to assign in Designer? Or is there something in Acrobat that is screwing it up? When I try to save the data to a spreadsheet, it doesn't appear that there is any data in the XML files.



Thanks for any help. This has been frustrating the heck out of me.

[Former Community Member]

There shouldn't be anything too special you need to do. Can you make the form and a sample of the xml data available on the net somewhere? If so, I'll take a quick look.



Chris

Adobe Enterprise Developer Support

[Former Community Member]

Thanks Chris,



You can find the form and code here:



http://www.bodiegroup.com/aldform/



I appreciate it.

[Former Community Member]

Looks like the binding for all the fillable fields on the form (look in the binding tab in the object inspector in the UI) is set to none. That means that no data is exported or imported for those fields. It should work better if you set the binding for all of those to normal.



Chris

Adobe Enterprise Developer Support

[Former Community Member]

Hugely helpful.



Since I am already embarrassing my husband's login name (this is actually his wife) and while I go try your tip, can you explain to me what exactly IS binding? And is Normal binding the default? Why would one set it to None if it does this? I can't find anything that really explains alot of the functionality in the Designer program.



Thanks Chris.



-Sonya

[Former Community Member]

By the way, your tip worked. I'm sure you aren't surprised to know. Thanks!

[Former Community Member]

Well, it can be a failry big subject, but I'll try to give a brief overview. Basically binding is how fields in the form are linked to nodes within the data DOM (so where data values will be imported from, and subsequently exported to).



Normal binding: The default. This means the data DOM and the form template DOM will follow the same hierarchy. So the field formName.subformName.fieldName will be bound to the node in the data at formName.subformName.fieldName.



Explicit binding: You can specify an explicit SOM expression that points to the node in the data DOM that your field binds to. The advantage is that the data DOM and form template DOM don't need to share the same hierarchy.



None binding: The field is not bound to anything in the data DOM, no data will be imported/exported for this field. It's rarely used, but there may be a case where you want a field on a form, but don't really care about the value afterwards.



Global binding: All fields with the same name on the form will share the same value. So if you have ten fields named MyField on your form, and typed in a value in one of them, the value would appear in all 10.



Hope that clears things up a bit.



Chris

Adobe Enterprise Developer Support