Are There Expandable Text Fields?

Tammie,

Can you post your form ...so much depends on teh structure that you set up.

Paul

Paul...thank you so much for offering to help...from what I have seen in forums...you are a God send!!!

Could I email you my form???

Thanks,

Tammie

Sure ...send it to LiveCycle8@gmail.com and post back here when you have sent it.

Paul

Here it is...thanks so much!

I just emailed it to you Paul.  Thanks!!

Are you sure you posted it to the correct address ....I have not recieved anything yet!

Paul

Paul,

I did send the first one to the wrong address.  I recent it to the correct address at approximately 1 PM EST.  I was just wondering if you did receive it.

Thanks,

Tammie

Hi~

I am still not understanding how to complete my form so that all the texts move down after using expandable boxes.  My page 2 works great thanks to Paul, however, now the rest of the document doesn't work properly.  And also, when my last expandable box is expanded onto the next page, the contents of that page move to another page, how do I keep the text directly under the expanded box??  I've come to the conclusion that I just can't understand this program.  I would Greatly appreciate any help on this.

Thanks,

Tammie

I think the issue you are having has to do with the concept of flowed versus positioned subforms. If you were designing a static form where you knew where every piece of the form went and all objects had a fixed sized then you could use a positioned subform where each object has a fixed position relative to the boundaries of the subform. In this scenario you will know exactly what objects to place on what pages hence you coudl define what objects fit on what pages. Note that this is how your form is defined. In contrast what if you defined all of the objects on your form, but did not know (or care) on what pages they woudl appear. You woudl simply define the objects and what sequence they shoudl appear in. Then Designer woudl lay them out one after like they were on a roll of toilet  paper. There woudl be no page separations. Then after all of the obejcts are layed out you coudl apply a page concept to the roll of paper and separate the roll into individual sheets. This is th eocncept behind a flowed subform. You shouls eliminate all of your page subforms and have only 1 page (at the highest level). All objects woudl be children of this Page node. The page concept is still applied but you are letting the product decide where the page breaks shoudl go (the page is defined by the Master Page). If we do this then everything will be left justified and set top to bottom. There are cases where we want to have objects beside each other. In these case we woudl wrap the objects that go together in another subform and make it positioned. This allows us to move the contents of that subform any where we want will in the boundaries of the subform. This means that you should break your form structure into managemable parts (i.e. Header, Questions, Tables, Footers) to give a few examples. Each section woudl have its own positioned subform and you can decide whether you want to allow page breaks in these sections or not. It is a different way to define a form and takes some getting used to. There are a number of good examples that ship with the product that show this concept. My favorite is the Dynamic Interactive PO sample. You can find it in the install directory of Designer in this location:

EN\Samples\Forms\Purchase Order\Dynamic Interactive\Form

One last note. Build your sections first inside of a Positioned Page1 subform. Then when you have it layed out (making sure that all of your sections (positioned subforms)  are the width of the page, then make your Page subform flowed. As I mentioned earlier. It will try a left justify these positioned subforms so if they are the width of the page then they will not move.

This is alot to digest so take it slow and do little bits a time and test as you go. Hopefully you will find this helpful.

Paul