Adobe LiveCycle Designer 8 Beginner

Question

I am very much new to adobe form design tools. Now my company wants me to develop an eForms system using Adobe LiveCycle Designer 8.
The requirements are like this
All pdf forms will be saved in the file server.
Users can enter data directly into the fields of the form.
The form can capture data the user enters, and provide interactive feedback such as when an employee enter his roll number his department should be filled automatically in the form.ie form provide dynamic data
The form should be able to process the user data directly to a database.
Can anybody give some good reference so that I can start the project?
Thanks in advance,
dev

Answer 1

I have a vital form that clients fill out, which is passed to many people in the company along the workflow. The form is a Planner and we have in the following PDF, Word Doc..
Well before, the Planner.pdf was originally created in Word, since most people have access to Word.. but evolved to a PDF form created from the Word Doc via Adobe LiveCycle Designer 8.0 w/ User Rights enabled so that the form could be filled out and saved using Adobe Reader.. which was a step better than Word.. being that it is free. But this needed to be easier and more to the point b/c some clients don't particularly like installing the latest version of Reader, even if you provide them the link. Nor do they like saving the form, filling the form, and attaching the form to send back.
My goal is to have the client fill an HTML version of the form, submit and be done with it, but everyone in the workflow be able to easily receive the filled Planner as a PDF form.
So some months ago I ran into this post Chris Trip, "Populate Livecycle PDF from mySQL database using PHP" #8, 22 Sep 2007 4:37 pm
which uses the command line Win32 pdftk.exe to merge an FDF file into an existing PDF on the remote server, and serve this to whoever.
My problem was with shared hosting and having the ability to use the Win32 pdftk.exe along with PHP which is predominantly used on Linux boxes. And we used a Linux box.
so i created the following unorthodox method, which a client fills the HTML version of the Planner, all field values are INSERTED into a table in MySQL DB, I and all filled planners that have been filled by clients to date can be viewed from a repository page where an XML file is served up of the corresponding client, but someone would have to have Acrobat Professional, to import the form data from the XML file into a blank form.. altoughh this is simple for me.. I have the PHP file already created so that when a Planner is filled and client submits. >> the an email is sent to me with a table row from the repository of the client name, #, email, and a link to d-load the XML file,
But I also have the PHP files created so that the Planner can be sent to by email to various people in the workflow with certain fileds ommitted they they do not need to see, but instead of the XML file beiong served up i need the filled PDF Planner to be served.
I can do this locally with ease on a testing server, but I am currently trying to use another host that uses cross-platform compatibility so i can use PHP and the pdftk.exe to achieve this, as that is why I am having to serve up an XML file b/c we use a Linux server for our website, and cant execute the exe.
Now that I am testing the other server (cross-platform host), just to use them to do the PDF handling (and it's only $5 per month) I am having problems with getting READ, WRITE, EXECUTE permissions..
Si guess a good question to ask is can PHP do the same procedure as the pdftk.exe, and i can eleminate it.
or how in the heck can i get this data from the DB into a blank PDF form, like i have described??
here are some link to reference
Populating a LiveCycle PDF with PHP and MySQL
http://www.andrewheiss.com/Tutorials?page=LiveCycle_PDFs_and_MySQL
HTML form that passed data into a PDF
http://www.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.20/20.11/FillOnlinePDFFormsUsingHTML/index.htm l
and an example
http://accesspdf.com/html_pdf_form/