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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, parse the query results and assign the values to the correspondent fields. LiveCycle won’t be able to decipher the XPath to the form fields, so you need to know those. However, that should be simple. Just use your main process (where your form variable is defined) and look at the path of your fields) and get your XPath from there. Beware that the xmlData variable of your rendering process matches to the last “data” node of your form variable in the main process. So that your xmlData XPath matches the main process form’s variable XPath like this:

/process_data/xmlData/ = /process_data/[formVarName]/object/data/xdp/datasets/data/
This means that if your form’s fields XPath translates to /process_data/[formVarName]/object/data/xdp/datasets/data/txtFullNameThen, your path translates to /process_data/xmlData/txtFullName  in your rendering process.

5-      Once you have assigned all the values you want to your xmlData variable, you have to inject now this new XML into the input document. If you copied the Render PDF Form, as I mentioned at the beginning, then your input doc var is called inDocData. By assigning the xmlData to the inDocData, LC will know that all you want to do is replace the XML part of the document variable.

Remember that on your main process you need to set this as the rendering service for the input form. Once you select this as your rendering service, you’ll notice that the userId variable you set on your rendering service will appear as a “Service Input” variable. Assign the “User’s Id” variable from the “task” to the “userId” input variable. Set the rest of the variables the with the same values as when you use the Render PDF Form service. 

Now, if you initiate your process from the workspace, you’ll get the form pre-populated with the logged in user info. If it doesn’t, read this post again and make sure you understand all the services used here. Also, remember that you can debug your process using the “Variable Logger” service.

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