Not sure where to begin with Acrobat or third party solution

[dana94930703]

The scenario is a submission form (several submission species specific variations actually) for an animal diagnostic laboratory. I'd be interested knowing how many of these requirements your system can meet below and the cost of your products. I'm looking for an architecture to solve some business problems. I need to rapidly develop an online submission form system with the following must have requirement below.  What are the recommended product or products which satisfy many or all of the requirements below?

Must have requirements:

1. Form architecture must be able to evolve rapidly so I need a solution were a technician not a programmer can maintain and update the basic form templates.
2. Fields and their values must be accessible and settable via some API that can be accessed via a .Net service for pre/post processing of the form.
3. Fields should be accessible and easily identifiable in the PDF by component name/tag/ or id.
4. There may be a need for custom widgets within the forms architecture such as the ability to highlight affected areas on an image or SVG drawing.
5. A few fields such as drop down lists will have hundreds of options an will need to be populated on the fly from a database. The ability to filter as the user types in an option list would be a nice to have feature.
6. The client should be able to supply a signature on the submission form.
7. Prior to our clients printing and or submitting the form a unique key supplied by our service that will be used to generate a bar ode. We can supply both the barcode number and or the barcode image as needed to set the value on an accessible forms component.
8. Validation should be enforced prior to the client printing or submitting, so a validation mechanism or API is required.
9. Upon submission our system will save the PDF as a blob to our database.
10. The submission form serves as a packing slip for our customers and when it arrives with samples the barcode is scanned and our system fetches the blobbed PDF and post processes it to add fields such as: received date and time and our case number.
11. On our end the submission form as a PDF becomes part of our new case and the form is parsed to obtain values entered by our clients to reduce data entry and prevent errors in data entry.
12. A nice to have feature would be the ability to update a configurable template on the fly to create species specific forms programmatically. the template, in this case, should be easily updatable by a non programmer.

[Gaslobster]

‌Hello Dana,

I have developed numerous enterprise PDF applications and have found most 3rd party solutions require programming and/or esoteric consulting with mediocre results. Your application can mostly leverage  functionality of Adobe's tool sets. Custom programming (preferably .NET) can be easily done for your unique requirements and  workflow efficiency. For feature 9, I would consider dynamic forms composition Instead of programmically generated.

For example, tiger and giraffe would have specific  (not templates) form pages that would combine with the  mammal page. The system could combine further  pages based on certain conditions. Aside from database maintenence and new requiremnts your application should be programmer free.

Regards,

Warren

[dana94930703]

Thanks Warren,

Dynamic forms sounds like a good possibility. Although many 3rd party tool are very good at what they do well it often includes working around or living with the limitations of many 3rd party solutions and then dealing with difficult upgrade paths and difficult to maintain code.

I have to confess I'm new to the Adobe tool sets. There seems to be so many options like Acrobat 8, 9, 10 and Live Cycle Designer, so I don't know which tool sets to start with for dynamic forms.

Ideal I'd like to supply my non-technical team with style guidelines and binding and naming conventions for our business logic needs. They would also need my help to break down the current complexities of their paper forms into logical parts that could be assembled into dynamic forms parts. I'd expect to also provide any scripting help that the dynamic forms might need for validation purposes as well as any server side pre and post processing as required.

I'm also partially limited as I work for a non profit owned in part by a university and a province so I need to spend wisely thinking about my time as well as long term maintainability. Thanks for your advice and is there anything you can offer to help be focus on relevant products in the Adobe tool set applicable to dynamic forms.

Regards,

Dan

[Test Screen Name]

You should probably forget Acrobat 8,9 and 10 which are all ancient versions not supported at all and with problems on the latest OS. The current version of Acrobat is DC, and the it is the only version sold. LiveCycle Designer is a possibility. Key point: there are two types of form: acroform, made in Acrobat (or other tools eg InDesign), and XFA (made with Designer). These are utterly different in every way; no solution made for one will work for the other. XFA forms do not work on mobile platforms, which may be crucial in future.