Adobe 38043740 Developing Applications - Page 926

DEVELOPING COLDFUSION 9 APPLICATIONS 921 Working with Documents, Charts, and Reports ColdFusion XDP files contain the XDP XML code and the PDF image. Therefore, the file size is larger than a PDF file. Only write PDF forms to XDP files if you must incorporate them into the LiveCycle Designer workflow on a LiveCycle server. Writing PDF output to an XML file ColdFusion lets you extract data from a PDF form and write the output to an XML data file. To do so, you must save the form output as a PDF file. (The cfpdfform tag source must always be a PDF file.) To write the output of a PDF file to an XML file, use the read action of the cfpdfform tag, as the following example shows: To save disk space, you can delete the PDF file and maintain the XML data file. As long as you keep the blank PDF form used as the template, you can use the populate action to regenerate the PDF file. For more information on populating forms, see "Populating a PDF form with XML data" on page 915. Extracting data from an HTTP post submission For an HTTP post submission, use the cfdump tag with the form name as the variable to display the data structure, as follows: Note: When you extract data from an HTTP post submission, always specify the form name as the source. For example, specify "#FORM.form1#" for a form generated from a standard template in LiveCycle. Notice that the structure is not necessarily the same as the structure of the PDF file used as the template (before submission). For example, the structure of a form before submission could look like the following example: struct form1 struct txtDeptName txtEMail txtEmpID txtFirstName txtLastName txtPhoneNum [empty string] [empty string] [empty string] [empty string] [empty string] [empty string] After submission by using HTTP post, the resulting structure would look like the following example: struct FORM1 struct Last updated 1/20/2012