saving form data and reopening it

[Former Community Member]

I understand that for Acrobat Reader to save a form with data it has to be enabled either by Reader Extensions or by Livecycle server or Acrobat Professional. However, a dumb question. In order to save data that I have entered in a text field and later reopen the form and see the data, does the text field have to be bound to a schema field? I'm using v7.1 of Designer.

[Former Community Member]

An xsd is not required to save a form draft.

[Former Community Member]

thanks Kyle,

I'm not sure what you mean by "save a form draft". Do you mean, "Save" or "Save As".



I detatched the binding to two of my fields and then set the binding to None (and Normal in subsequent different test). Next, i gave it all the rights I could through Reader Extensions.



Then I opened the form and got the message, "You can save typed data into this form". Then I type some data into the fields and Save (or Save As) the form. When I re-open it the fields are empty. Any ideas?

[Former Community Member]

I may have found the answer. we are using LCD to create xdp forms (and for experimentation I can save as dynamic pdf and attach rights if needed). One of the options in File->Form Properties->Performance is "Form Requires Server-side Data Binding And/Or Scripting". My understanding is that we need this option because we pre-populate data when the form is rendered from a Siebel application.



However, when I uncheck this option, save the form and apply reader extensions - I can now save data in my unbound fields, re-open the form and the data has been persisted.



Is this correct?

[Former Community Member]

thought I'd ask the question a different way.



Assuming that you have the correct rights assigned, in an XFA form can you save data in a text field that is not bound?

[Former Community Member]

If the field is not bound then it will not be part of the definition of the structure of the data that you have defined. If there is no defined structure then using Normal binding will cause the data to be saved in the structure of the hierarchy of the form.



Hope that helps

[Former Community Member]

It helps but I can's seem to get it to work that way. I change the binding as normal on one or two fields. When I reopen the form, only the data in fields that are bound to the schema is preserved. The data that I keyed in the "normal" bound fields is not preserved.

[Former Community Member]

Thats what is expected ....if you want to preserve those fields you will have to bind them to something in the schema. Can you modify the schema to hold this additional info?



The reason for this behavior is that if we put those items in the saved data then the data would not validate against the schema.

[Former Community Member]

thank you. It would be nice if we could. We exchange data with a Siebel CRM and sometimes the form also gets uploaded as an attachment to Siebel. Some of the fields are not in the main database but simply answers to questions. We use Siebel to generate the schema to make sure that the database fields match.