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LiveCycle ES Update 1 Beta has been released to the public.  If you work with LiveCycle, make sure to enroll in the LiveCycle ES Prerelease Program to obtain a copy of this beta version.  If you're wondering what's new with this update, Greg Wilson has posted a summary of the new features on his blog.

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I’ve seen several questions in the LiveCycle user forum about how to pre-populate a form with user data in the Workspace, so I’ve decided to demonstrate how to accomplish this. Notice that although this explanation is digested enough so that a beginner can accomplish the task, you need to have a good understanding of how forms are rendered in LiveCycle, basic understanding of the XML Path Language (XPath) & how to set the XML schema to your form.

First let’s understand how LiveCycle renders a form in the workspace for a specific process. When you set your process you set an input variable which holds the form to render. LiveCycle by default assigns the “Default Renderer” service to this variable so that it gets rendered properly in the Workspace. This “Default Renderer” is just a short-lived process with several activities that sets variables and enables your form for the workspace.

If you want to pre-populate a form with data, all you have to do is create your custom renderer service. For instance, let’s say you want to render a PDF form in the Workspace. So we need the “Render PDF Form” (see image 1) from the “Samples Forms” category (this samples should be in your process list unless you/the administrator didn’t upload the LiveCycle Archives that comes with the installation). This process takes a PDF form and renders it to the Workspace. First the short-lived process sets some parameters, then renders the form using the renderPDFForm operation from the Forms Service, and then enables the PDF Form to be rendered in the workspace.

    

Render PDF Process

To pre-populate the form we need to get the logged in user info and inject that into the form before getting to the “render Form” activity. To do that you can copy the “Render PDF Form” process into a new process. Then to your new process you want to: <more />

1-      Add two input variables: one called “userId” of type string and another one xmlData of type xml. 

2-      In the first step of the process you want to extract the form’s XML data and assign that to the xmlData variable. 

3-      Then, use the “Query Single Row” operation from the “JDBCService” and query the LiveCycle database to get the user’s info based on the “userId” variable. You can use the LiveCycle’s default datasource which should be “IDP_DS”. Your query will look something like 

SELECT canonicalname, commonname, email, organization, address
                FROM edcprincipalentity e
                                WHERE e.id = [xpath to your userId variable]

4-      Now that you have the form’s XML data you can assign values to the fields by using XPath. So, (continue reading…)

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This Wednesday, I'll be speaking at the new Baltimore Adobe User Group (BAUG) on LiveCycle ES.  If you live around the Baltimore area, this is a great opportunity to learn what is LiveCycle ES and what it can do for your company.  My presentation comprise two parts as described below:

What’s all the buzz about Adobe LiveCycle ES?

Have you heard about LiveCycle and how great it is but never had a chance to see it in action? Maybe you’ve heard how it can unlock PDF documents, control who can view/print/copy documents even when these have left your network, render forms in multiple formats (HTML, PDF and SWF) all with a single file. Learn why the buzz about LiveCycle ES and why renowned companies like Wachovia and the Federal Government are using LiveCycle ES to automate their business processes.

Unleash the power of Reader Extensions ES

Have you ever filled out a PDF form and, after all the effort, noticed you cannot save your data? Or maybe try to add attachments, comments, signatures, connect to a database but are unable because of the limitations of Adobe Reader? Learn how you can use LiveCycle Reader Extensions ES to unlock these and more capabilities for single or bulk PDF documents.

I'll be preceded by Curtis Layton, whom will be speaking on: Intro to Object Oriented Programming in ColdFusion.

You can get more details about the event at the BAUG website: http://baltimore-aug.org/

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I’ll be speaking in the next LiveCycle User Group meeting in February at the David Packard Conference Center in DC. The topics I’ll be presenting are:

• Capabilities and usage of Reader Extensions
• Integrating LiveCycle ES with your backend systems

To register and to see more details on this meeting go to the Capital Area LiveCycle User Group website at: http://www.dc-livecycle.com/index.cfm?event=meetings.showMeeting&meetingId=29

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Interesting thing I came across in the past couple of days.  At work we have setup a TurnKey installation of LiveCycle ES for testing purposes.  As you might know this means LiveCycle is deployed in JBOSS with MySQL as the backend database.

Well, being a newbie to JBoss and because I did not take the time to Read the JBoss documentation since this was for testing purposes (Who does anyways?) I stumbled upon a merciless error that did not want to go away!

At one point I renamed the default data-source(DefaultDS) to something else and updated several files as mentioned in this tutorial from onjava.com.

Changing the name of the default data-source caused a connection failure since the “DefaultDS” that was being referenced in many files (as I explain below) did not exist. So, the server log was being bombarded by this error every 5 seconds or so! 

“ERROR [org.jboss.ejb.plugins.jms.JMSContainerInvoker] Reconnect failed: JMS

provider failure detected

javax.naming.NameNotFoundException: XAConnectionFactory”

I didn’t notice this until LiveCycle Workspace started to fail on every form submitted, showing the following error:

“An error occurred submitting the form (task xxx, form {1}). (ALC-WKS-007-043)”

Explanation:

 By default JBoss uses Hypersonic SQL (HSQL) open-source database which is written entirely in JAVA. The name for the default datasource is “DefaultDS”, this is more important than what one might think since JBoss reference this datasource in many places and several services depends on it. So, changing this default data-source takes quite a few extra steps than setting a regular data-source connection.  Thanks to the guys at Adobe, the turnkey installation of LiveCycle does all the dirty work for you so that JBoss is reconfigured to use MySQL as the default database.  

Fixing the error:

To fix the problem I just restored my original data-source with the proper name and added my own data-sources below just as:

<datasources>
  <local-tx-datasource>
      <jndi-name>DefaultDS</jndi-name>
      <connection-url>jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/adobe</connection-url>
      <driver-class>com.mysql.jdbc.Driver</driver-class>
      <user-name>adobe</user-name>
      <password>pwd</password>
      <exception-sorter-class-name>org.jboss.resource.adapter.jdbc.vendor.MySQLExceptionSorter</exception-sorter-class-name>

<metadata>
         <type-mapping>mySQL</type-mapping>
      </metadata>
  </local-tx-datasource>

<!– my own ds –>

<local-tx-datasource>
    <jndi-name>MySqlDS</jndi-name>
    <connection-url>jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/myownDb</connection-url>
    <driver-class>com.mysql.jdbc.Driver</driver-class>
    <user-name>myUser</user-name>
    <password>myPwd</password>
    <exception-sorter-class-name>org.jboss.resource.adapter.jdbc.vendor.MySQLExceptionSorter</exception-sorter-class-name>

    <metadata>
       <type-mapping>mySQL</type-mapping>
    </metadata>
  </local-tx-datasource>
</datasources>

– And of course follow the extra steps mentioned at this tutorial.

As simple as it is, no one in the LiveCycle Forum was able to answer this question directly and the only person who had the same error before have opted to reinstall the server from the ground up at that time. I also “google” the JBoss error message and nothing lead me to the solution.  So, here it is in case some other folks out there using LiveCycle end up in the same situation.

By the way, if you wish to change the DefaultDS to something else or you want to change your default database, the steps to take are posted here.

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