PDF Submittal response

[bwvick]

We have many PDF forms that we use the submit function on.  The submit function sends the PDF to our webserver, there we process the PDF by grabbing all the form fields and saving to a database along with the actual PDF.

The server returns some html to describe the success/failure of the submittal.  If the submittal was not accepted the html will show the reasons for not accepting it.

Normally acrobat will save this html to a folder named c:\users\[current]\AppData\Local\Temp\acrobat_sbx and will prompt us to open the html document yes/no.  When we select Yes it will open the html in our default browser.  

We have a few installations where starting this week this function no longer works, the html is saved in the folder correctly, however acrobat will prompt with a message "An error occurred during the submit process.  Cannot process content of type text/html; charset=utf-8".  

I have went through all the settings and I don't see anything pertaining to this.  Other workstations with the same version are working.  

Any ideas?

[Thom Parker]

Returning HTML to an Acrobat Submit was never a reliable method, you were just fortunate that the particular version of Acrobat in use handled it in a convenient way. In older versions, Acrobat converted the HTML into  a PDF.  AFAIK there is not documentation on this behavior. 

You would be much better served to use a documented method, such as returning FDF.  The FDF could even provide a redirect to open a web page. Or it could display a popup with error or success information. 

[bwvick]

Any documentation you can provide on FDF.  I am not familiar with that format.

[Thom Parker]

It is a PDF specific format. You'll find the complete specification inside the PDF spec (ISO32000). FDF has not changed in many years, so an old PDF spec (pre-ISO) will do. 

You can get an idea of how it is structured by exporting data from your form in FDF format. 

I use FDF for much more than data, for examle sending scripts and messages back to the form. 

[bwvick]

So i would need to have a field on the form maybe call it SubmissionStatus and then return an FDF from the webserver that would populate it with something like "Success" or "Failure"?

Any idea why the feature of opening the html document stopped working?  Some of these forms have been around for 6+ years and have worked fine until this week.  Also they still work in PDF Export on our mobile devices.

[Thom Parker]

Since there is little to no documentation on how Acrobat responds to HTML, it is impossible to know why changes to this behavior were made. To give you an idea of how far the documentation is out of date, this line is in the reference entry for the submitForm function.

 To call this method, you must be running inside a web browser or have the Acrobat Web Capture plug-in installed.

It as been many years since the web browser was useful for using forms. But, there may be something about the Web Capture plug-in that is relevant to your issue. It's hard to say without spending a lot of time digging into something for which there is little info.   

As for FDF.  There are two features that I use to send messages back to the user. 

1) there is a "Status" entry that is just a text string. This text is display in a popup to the user

2) There are two script entries, Before and After.  One executes before data is entered into the form fields, and one executes after. I typically use one of these as the only entry in an FDF. The script is used to call a function in the PDF form that performs some processing, including displaying a popup message to the user. 

These features can be used along side adding text to a status form field, as you've suggested. 

[Charles3141479505h2]

We noted the same behavior in a very similar configuration where form data was being processed on a server and a response returned for confirmation.  In our case the html response from the server was being opened in Adobe Reader rather than in a web browser. Now submissions by Adobe Reader get the same error message you noted. If we submit the form using Adobe Acrobat, however, the html response confirmation is displayed in Acrobat without an error message.