One of the many new offerings in LiveCycle ES4 is Mobile Forms that is ability to display and fill forms on mobile devices like iPad and other tablets. Mobile forms uses the already stable and widespread html5 as its rendering format so practically, any device that supports html5 can show LiveCycle forms. With the explosion of mobile devices, our existing customers were looking for this component to increase their reach and not only that, it would also enable many new use cases. Mobile Forms plays key role in customer’s workflow and enabling that workflow step on mobile device will further reduce the time taken to complete the process.
Mobile Forms generates html5 document for XFA forms. The API is RESTful, another change from the Document based LiveCycle service APIs as html is more suited for http requests. Html fragment for XFA form can be embedded into any html document.
“Web” and “online” are two closely associated terms, downright synonymous to many people. But with the advent of html5, now people are developing offline web apps. Mobile Forms, being an html5 document, can also be used to build offline forms. So one can open the form even if she is not connected to company intranet or for that matter internet. Mobile Forms closely follow the html5 offline W3C spec for building offline-able forms. I’ll discuss this feature in detail in some other post. Let’s focus on html5 form render first.
As I mentioned Mobile Forms is a RESTful application and its render API has the following commonly used parameters to specify form and data:
| Parameters | Description |
|---|---|
| template | This parameter takes the file name of the template. |
| contentRoot | This parameter is for specifying the path where template and associated resources resides. |
| dataRef | This parameter takes absolute path of the data file to be merged with the template. Please remember it takes absolute value of the data file path. |
| data | This parameter takes UTF-8 encoded data bytes to be merged with the template. |
| submitUrl | The url where the form data will be posted to. |
| debugDir | Directory location on server machine where the debug intermediate files will be dumped. Do not use this parameter in production as it will slow down the rendering considerably. This parameter is for Adobe internal usage and can be changed in the future. |
| templateBytes | This parameter takes UTF-8 encoded template bytes to be rendered. This is again Adobe internal API and can be changed in future. |
As you can see, Forms Mobile render API is fairly simple and can be easily used. Out of the box, the render API is exposed on both GET and POST. The sample uri looks like the following:
http://<lcserver>:<port>/lc/content/xfaforms/profiles/default.html?contentRoot=c:/xdps&template=sampleForm.xdp
Hit the above URL in browser and see your XFA forms being rendered as html5 document. XFA forms can also have webservices or scripts that are to be run on server side. In that case, the rendered html doc contacts http://<lcserver>:<port>/lc/content/xfaforms/submission/default.html url so make sure you don’t block this url while hardening the system in order to smooth functioning of form.
In the next post I’ll cover how to quickly test the forms.
