Is it possible to have a live drop-down menu in PDF?

[avam7909067]

Summary: I need a drop-down menu to populate with numbers that a client will enter themselves from a previous page in fillable forms. Is this possible? Is it possible if i make it all on one page?

Context:

Page 1 of the PDF is a fillable form. I sent this to clients, where they fill in some forms including their Account IDs. This could have anywhere from 3 to 100 answers put into it depending on the client it's being sent to. For example: say the group is Coca Cola and they have 45 accounts. Each account will be here with a unique account number.

On the next page, the Account ID's need to all auto-populate into a dropdown menu. Is this even possible? I have this working in excel, it grabs a section of rows (b7 through b107) and auto-populates the list depending on what's entered in those areas. Keep in mind: I did NOT set up this excel sheet, i've been tasked with designing it and updating to PDF for easier use... I cannot manually put in the drop-down menu as it will be different for each and every customer, it HAS to be populated by the forms filled on page one to work...

((extra context if wanted: once the numbers are all in the dropdown menu that number will be put in a concatenated form, telling the customer their URLS for each and every account they own. This way we have a full list of all their accounts, and they can easily find their URLs if needed. www.Website/account#/example , i got the java script for this part already finished so hopefully making the drop-menu Live won't mess it up? i don't think it would...)

[try67]

Yes, this is possible using a script, but it's tricky. The most tricky part is when to update the drop-down. Each time any of the fields in the previous pages are changed? What if a selection is already made in it? etc.

I think that using a button to update it is the most clear option, and the easiest to implement.

That way you just use the button's MouseUp event to collect all the values from the text fields and then populate them into the drop-down field, overwriting any pre-selected value. This will require a custom-made script, of course.

And it doesn't matter if the fields are on different pages.

[avam7909067]

i don't know javascript, all the scripting so far is stolen whole-sale from online forums and tweaked to match my form names... sounds like we'll have to re-reconsider what tool is best for this piece. thanks!

[Thom Parker]

Here's an article that shows the code for changing the entries in a list. The exact same code with work with a dropdown

https://acrobatusers.com/tutorials/list_and_combo_in_lc

You'll find much more info on this topic here:

https://www.pdfscripting.com/public/List-Field-Usage-and-Handling.cfm