Hello--
I am a LiveCycle Designer beginner, so please bear with me.
I'm hoping to automate the creation of multiple PDFs from within a LiveCycle XML form I created. We have a database with vendor contact information. Each vendor could have multiple records within our database (currently they range from 2-60). We currently send to a pointperson at each vendor an Excel spreadsheet that contains all the records associated with that vendor. That person then modifies, adds and deletes the records in that spreadsheet. We then input those updates into our database.
We recognize that this is an antiquated form of contact management, and want to improve. Of course, the challenge is that we do not have our own server to use, and we are not able to use any third party service that costs anything. Since we already have LiveCycle Designer, I'm hoping XML forms can make things easier for our administrators. I really hope there is a scriptable solution for this.
Here is what I've done (much of it to learn how LiveCycle Designer works).
- I created an XDP with all the appropriate fields.
- I also created separate XML files for each vendor.
- I was able to create individual PDFs when I associate the vendor-specific XML file to the XDP using the Locate Data File field in the Defaults tab of the Form Properties.
While this works, I essentially have just done the same amount of work as our current solution. Nonetheless, since LiveCycle is scriptable, I'm hoping that I can automate a number of these tasks. Is it possible to automate from within Designer, the creation of multiple PDFs—one for each vendor—using the same XDP form? Do I need to make the XDP form a TDS file? Is this even the right approach? Is there a way to connect to the database and filter out by vendor the information I need?
I apologize if this is all over the place. Any and all advice would be most appreciated!!!
