Show and hide fields using a dropdown?

[JMVan7855]

Hi all - I posted this in the Acrobat forum, and they said you guys might could help.

I have a form with a dropdown field containing the following:

Program A

Program B

Program C

Program D

If a user selects Program C (for instance) I would like to display an additional page in the PDF with form fields related to that program. (And the same for the other programs). In other words, most of my form (which is a school application) is generic (e.g. demographic information, prior education, etc.) but the each program has a few extra fields they would like to collect.

Shamefully, I haven't learn to code yet (although I'm hoping to start soon!). Could anyone give any help? Is there a way to do this without code? Thanks for your your time.

[Josh_Geurian]

Do you have and/or use Liveycle for the creation of your PDFs or are these forms made in Acrobat? Both apps have what are called Actions which are prebuilt actions which can be used without knowing a single line of code. It just depends on what what app you are using because the location of the Action builder is different in Acrobat and Livecycle.

[JMVan7855]

Thanks for your reply, Josh. I'm using Acrobat for the design. I've done a little in live cycle, but it was the last version. Again, I really appreciate the help!

[Josh_Geurian]

Acrobat Forms are create for creating quick and easy forms and if you happen to know Javascript, allows you to create custom actions like showing/hiding fields or pages. Livecycle is a bit of a more robust form creation app that perhaps is not as simple as Acrobat, but provides a much more advanced GUI for novice users. For example Liveycle has what is called the Action Builder which is a set of 17 actions like highlighting certain parts of the form, changing the font, set the focus to a certain part or even showing/hiding certain parts of a form based on a button click or a field that a user enters. If you lack the skills to make your own Javascript code I suggest using Livecycle and the Action Builder (In the Windows version it is at the toolbar at the top under Tools.) What you would do open your form in Livecycle, go to the Action Builder, create a new action where the object control is the drop down list with a "text selected" option from the list and then in the result block select "show/hide a field" and then just select the element or page that you want to hide/show. I believe you should have this option in the version of Livecycle you have. The only other method would be to create an "If-Then" statement in Javascript for the drop down box that sets the fields to visibile when the correct function is selected and hidden when it is not. It is possible, but beyond a newbe like myself.