Format of response from distributed form

Question

Hi guys,
I have been working with a trial of Acrobat X Pro and Livecycle ES II, to determine if we can use it effectively to replace paper forms in our workplace. We have also recently deployed Alfresco, an open source CMS, which is very tightly integrated with what we would like to do with Adobe forms. I am a little confused though, at trying to figure out what controls the format of the response.
With the forms I create in liveCycle, when distributed, the response seems to be either a pdf or an xml file. The first few forms I designed arrived on the server as pdf's when I tested them (which is exactly what I wanted). The last couple I have created (using liveCycle) however, seem to always arrive as xml. I have gone through every page of the Distribute... wizard with what I feel is rather a fine toothed comb but cannot find anywhere to control this.
Today I have discovered that Alfresco is unable to parse the form fields in the liveCycle PDF's (this is to do with the Tika parser and PDFBox, but isn't really related to this disccussion directly), so I have switched to Acrobat which, in my testing so far, does create forms parsable by Tika. When I distribute the form from Acrobat though, the responses always seem to be in xfdf format (which seems to boil down to xml anyway).
I am sure that actual PDF's were created at some point. I still have test distribution folders full of pdf responses. Does anyone know what I am missing which controls the response??

Answer 1

Hi Bill,
I know the data format would be alot more useful if we were just needing to get the data into a database or some other process or application, but the need here is moreso for the actual PDF. This is also required to be an automated process, so importing the data files into acrobat manually is not an option.
When you say are we collecting data by email or web script, I am not 100% sure I understand. When we choose distribute form... there are three choices - collect responses on Acrobat.com, collect responses in my email inbox, and collect choices in our own server. We choose the latter of the three (own server) and specify the CIFS path to a folder on the Alfresco server.
Essentially all I need here is to find out which setting allows me to have pdf's (not xml or fdf or xfdf) collected in the responses folder when the form is distributed using the "own server" option. When I go through the distribute wizard, the only options I set seem to be: How the data is collected (own server), the path to the server, whether or not to collect name and email and the server profile name. (although now I think of it, I believe that originally I was leaving the "collect name and email" checkbox ticked originally when I was seeing actual PDF's collected, so I may try that now. If that's the setting controlling the response format though I would be surprised and find it incredibly unintuitive).