Multiple Records from Drop-down

[kennyboy2001]

Hi All,

Re: LiveCycle Designer 8.1

I need a little guidance.

I am constructing a form which will contain Contact information. The form itself has information for a singular contact but the idea is to support information for multiple contacts by selecting another contact in a drop-down and then showing information for that selected contact.

The user can also add a new Contact. For each new Contact, the user will add the contact and fill-out the form. The form itself as displayed is information for a singular contact.

The new Contact name will also populate as a new selection in a drop-down for selection at the top of the form. This will allow the user to switch between contacts and see their respective information.

At this point, I have all objects in the form set for 1 Contact.

I think I can handle the code to add a new Contact to the drop-down.

My question is: In order to handle "n" Contacts, do I have to duplicate all of the objects in the original form for each new Contact.

Or ...can I use the existing form objects as data holder (sort of a template) for display only and hold the multiple Contact information in some other way.

Since I am a database developer at heart, the latter seems like a more logical approach but I don't think LiveCycle Designer (in Client runtime) supports an internal database. I may be wrong or other options may exist.

Can anyone offer a preferred direction - methodology?

Thanks ~ Ken

[Former Community Member]

You are going to need a means of holding all of the contacts. You are correct in stating that there is no internal database, so I woudl recommend using an xml data file for this. When you load the form you can import the data file and the dropdown will populate with the contact names. Then when the user chooses a contact the other info will populate with taht specifc contact's information. Other alternatives woudl be to use an external database and use web services or ODBC to communicate  with the DB. Although this sounds locical note that Reader does not support these types of connections out of the box. To accomplish this you woudl require a product called LiveCycle Reader Extensions server. If you are using Acrobat then this is not required. If you use ODBC then a DSN woudl hav eto be setup on each users machine so there is a maintenance cost involved (usually not an issue for a small number of users). Let us know which way you think is best and we can pursue from that.

Paul