PDF Forms
by Mike Cohen
on
Apr 29, 2008 at 5:08:57 am
PDF forms can be useful for some business/administrative purposes.
Let's say i have a CD-ROM authored in Flash. There are several PDF forms on the CD - I want to be able to have the user fill out the form, then hit a button within the Flash interface (or other 3rd party unknown app) and the PDF form is saved to the user's hard drive, and can be recalled later from a drop down menu.
Anyone have any experience with this type of feature in an interactive NON-WEB based program. On the web it is so easy.
Re: PDF Forms by Jeffrey Gould on Apr 29, 2008 at 1:49:39 pm
Hi Mike, You might want to ask this question in the Adobe Acrobat forum...they are really helpful and knowledgeable. Ironically I just asked yesterday how to have a patient fill out medical forms and submit online using a CGI Script.
Re: PDF Forms by Brendan Coots on May 3, 2008 at 11:41:27 pm
You can use Flash to write values to a database (or even a txt document) and set up the Flash interface to pull those entries back out of the database, but I don't know how much luck you'll have trying to get the functionality you are looking for with PDFs. Getting Flash to access other files on the user's system (especially functionality like opening, modifying and saving files) is trickier than you might think.
Flash content on a CDROM can access the hard drive/file system and even open files, but saving them and recalling them etc. is quite a challenge. There is a program called Zinc that enables many more file system features within Flash, but it's pricey and has a learning curve.
Your best bet might be looking into FlashPaper, which was essentially Macromedia's answer to PDFs before the Adobe acquisition. FlashPaper integrates much more seamlessly into Flash, although you may still have issues calling up docs, saving them and recalling them. For security reasons Flash doesn't do this type of thing super easily, without the aforementioned Zinc app.
