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Hed101
Participant
May 24, 2018
Question

Interactive PDF - How to create form fields repeat on button-click

  • May 24, 2018
  • 2 replies
  • 2305 views

Hello to the board.

Trying to create a form including adress-fields for multiple adresses.

When the user clicks a button, i.e. '+' another field-set for another adress is supposed to show up.

How can this be achieved ?

Googled quite some time on this issue but couldn't find anything. In the CMS-world this would be called repater-fields I guess.

Thanks in advance.

    This topic has been closed for replies.

    2 replies

    Derek Cross
    Community Expert
    Derek CrossCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    May 24, 2018

    Interactive pdf forms are only suitable for simple interactions, such as text fields and simple hyperlinks. Because of the variety of devices and readers anything else may not work.

    Read more here: It's okay to say no to interactive PDF

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      Dave Merchant
      Legend
      May 24, 2018

      Forms that can "expand" themselves is a feature of XFA (LiveCycle) documents, not of static PDFs. They can be created in LiveCycle Designer - this used to be included with Acrobat but is now an enterprise product.

      https://www.adobe.com/products/livecycle/tools/designer.html

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      Hed101Author
      Participant
      May 24, 2018

      Thanks for the quick reply. So there's no other way to achieve this with Abobe products besides getting the LiveCycle Designer ?

      Could you link me to a tutorial or anything covering the usecase please ?

      D
      Dave Merchant
      Legend
      May 24, 2018

      Not if you want the ability for the form to add/remove fields dynamically. Acrobat's forms can only do very basic things like disabling/enabling a field, they cannot change the page layout. XFA forms may have the same PDF file extension, but internally they are chunks of software that create the page dynamically when the document opens, and so they can change it in response to user actions. They also support more varied types of field, and are designed to talk to a LiveCycle server for high-volume submission of data. The IRS uses XFA forms, for example.

      One important caveat is that an XFA PDF can only be opened in Acrobat or Adobe Reader, and even then it is a read-only document. These days many people use the PDF rendering engines built into web browsers, or view files on mobile apps. They don't work with XFA.

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