Creating a hyperlink in a form to send to an email

Question

I'm pretty new at using Adobe Acrobat 9 Standard and I'm trying to make a form to put on my company's website.  I want to create a hyperlink that will submit the form to my email once a client has fill it out.  I have been testing it and sending the pdf to myself and I'm getting the error, Unable to locate the form, because the FDF lacks and /F key.  If the FDF came back as a result of a submit from a PDF form, then the URL is probably missing "#FDF" at the end.  I then tried putting the "#FDF" at the end of the URL which was mailto:myemailaddress"#FDF" and it didn't work so I'm just not really sure what to try next. 

Answer 1

THe #FDF that you can add at the end of the URI is not relevant to submitting by email,(via mailto), only when submitting to a web server. It tells Reader/Acrobat to expect an FDF response from the server, as opposed to an HTML response or something else. So don't include it when using a mailto URI.
The FDF file that you receive will contain the form data and it can be imported into a blank form. If the FDF does not contain an /F key, then you'll have to manually import the FDF into a blank form using Acrobat. Exactly how you do this depends on which version of Acrobat you're using. In Acrobat 9 you'd select: Forms > Manage Form Data > Import Data
and select the FDF that you received.
An alternative is to set up the submit form action to submit the entire filled-in PDF. For this to work, the document has to be Reader-enabled for those who use a pre-11 version of Reader, or if the form uses digital signatures. (Since you're using Acrobat Standard, digital signatures are not a concern since Standard can't enable a document to allow them.) The main problem with this approach is there are licensing restrictions. In short, if you make the form available to more than 500 recipients (as you do when posting on a publicly accessible web site, for example), you can use data form no more than 500 instances of the form that have been returned to you. When a form is set up to submit as FDF, there are no such licensing restrictions involved, but it does mean the additional step of importing the data into a blank form if you need to have a filled-in version.