Building a smartform in LC with radio buttons

[#1]

Hi everyone!

I am brand new to Adobe LiveCycle. I convinced my employer (a top 15 university) to purchase LC so that I could build smartform pdfs for my department to make our jobs easier. I have gone through as many tutorials as I could find but the training resources for newbs in LC is terrible.

My goal is to build a smart pdf like the one found here http://www.wirb.com/Pages/DownloadForms.aspx. Specifically the one to the right of "Initial Review submission Form".

I want my forms to be interactive/dynamic based on radio button selection. Full disclosure, I am NOT a developer in any sense, I am a former USN/USCG paramedic with solid PC skills but no programming skills since BASIC, Fortran, etc. I run a clinical research oversight office. I have no experience with form design, Javascript, etc.

None of the Adobe ES4 (or earlier) documentation tells me how to do this with radio buttons or checkboxes. The only tutorials that were somewhat helpful were the ones from Tru Tech Troubleshooting on YouTube but even those were limited because there are no example files available to learn with.

I tried to reverse engineer the smartform I referenced above to see how they did it but their form is locked.

Being able to build dynamic forms would make me a hero in my office, perhaps the entire department, but if I cannot make the radio buttons dynamic, then this is a lost cause.

Can anyone help?

[#2]

I would be happy to work with you to get you started. Yes the training material is terrible and always has been, however the community is awesome and you will be able to get a great deal of support. If you'd like to reach out to me directly I will do my best to get you started. mousland@gmail.com

[#3]

I started with these tutorials:

Creating a Purchase Order Form - http://help.adobe.com/en_US/livecycle/9.0/lcdesigner_qs_poform.pdf

Creating a Purchase Order Form That Has a Flowable Layout - http://help.adobe.com/en_US/livecycle/9.0/lcdesigner_qs_poformflowable.pdf

The forms can be coded with Javascript or FormCalc. Sometimes you will use both. The Help included with LC is great, i have gotten many tips from there. The scripting does use prompting to try to make it easier to code, sometimes it helps but building your JS knowledge definitely will help.

Something to keep in mind about dynamic forms, they will work fully in Internet Explorer and Acrobat, but wont work well or at all in other browsers and mobile apps.

I have been creating LC forms for 3 or 4 years and only now my bosses are starting to see the potential of them.

The form you would like to create would not be too difficult. It does have to be a flowable form, the radio button code will have to specify checked and unchecked code.

The biggest tip i can give it to build your flowable form into multiple tables. Flowing your form compresses everything together, using tables of different sizes, rows and columns will make them much easier to handle with hiding and showing. Add blank table rows or just protected textfields in between for spacing...why protected? Protected fields are inactive and cant be tabbed to, a read only field will still be in the tab order.

I could go on and on. Welcome to LC.