Prepopulating Flex application

Question

Hi,
I am using flex applications for designing forms for Licecycle ES.
I have a problem about prepopulation of forms.
For XDP forms, I could prepopulate forms using render pdfform service.
But for rendering Flex forms, I could only see Read resource content service which only gets the application from defined resource.
And as I know, it has no capability of merging template and form data as I did for XDP forms.
For example my current problem is when process creator opens a form to initiate a process, I want to prepopulate the form with some userss
İnformation like name, departmet etc..
Is there any method to propose to solve this problem?
Note : As my flex form is opened in workspace (which is also a flex application ), and in workspace application I could see the username (commonname), may be it is possible to get this variable of parent applications from my flex form. If it is defined public..
Anyone knows how can I reach this variable?
Thanks in advance
Regards
Cihan

Answer 1

There is a way to do that. This is an extract from an email one of my colleague on the subject:
In your Flex form you will make use of the FormConnector (see Flex Language Reference under lc.core.FormConnector which is used to simplify communication between Flex app and Workspace ES) that exposes three events (formInitiallData, formSaveDataRequest, formSubmitDataRequest). This will let you run a function when the Flex form initializes in Workspace - -the goal of that function will be to make a call to retrieve the data required and merge it into the Flex form.
In order to retrieve the data required for pre-population a common need would be to retrieve data related to the logged in user making the start form request. This information is not known to your Flex Form but is known to the Workspace ES Flex application that is hosting the form. So what you will need to do here is gain access into the Workspace application to retrieve the current session. From that current session you can extract the id (sessionManager.authenticatedUser.oid) of the current user. This will be an argument to your function calling some external source for data to be pre-populated.
You can now make a call to the data source to retrieve the data you want. For example, call a LC process that is exposed as a Web Service taking as its input a users id (the oid you retrieved from the session) whose steps will make the call to the directory server and get the info you need (e.g. department, manager, employee id, etc.) to prepopulate and return it back to the Flex form.
I do not have a working sample of this but below is a portion of sample code that would be in the Flex form and reflects what was discussed above.
<mx:Application
xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml"
xmlns:lc="http://www.adobe.com/2006/livecycle" creationComplete="connector.setReady()" width="100%" height="100%">
<lc:FormConnector id="connector"
formInitialData="initialData(event)"
formSaveDataRequest="returnFormData(event)"
formSubmitDataRequest="returnFormDataForSubmit(event)"/>
<mx:Script>
<![CDATA[
import lc.domain.SessionMap;
import lc.core.ISessionManager;
private function getUserId():string
var session:SessionMap = SessionMap(Application.application.session);
var sessionManager:ISessionManager = ISessionManager (session.getObject("lc.core.ISessionManager"));
return sessionManager.authenticatedUser.oid;
Private function prepop(userId:String):XML
\\add code to call Web Service and retrieve info to prepopulate (in our example à name, dept, mgr)
private function initialData(event:DataEvent):void
if (event.data != null && event.data != "")
xmldata = new XML(event.data);
else
var myUID:String = getUserId();
xmldata = prepop(myUID);
]]>
</mx:Script>
<mx:VBox horizontalCenter="0" verticalCenter="0" width="100%" height="100%">
<mx:Form id="theForm" backgroundColor="0xffffff" width="100%" height="100%">
<mx:FormHeading label="My form"/>
<mx:FormItem label="Name" required="true">
<mx:TextInput id="userName" text="{xmldata.name}" change="xmldata.name = userName.text; connector.setDirty()"/>
</mx:FormItem>
<mx:FormItem label="Name" required="true">
<mx:TextInput id="userDepartment" text="{xmldata.dept}" change="xmldata.dept = userDepartment.text; connector.setDirty()"/>
</mx:FormItem>
<mx:FormItem label="Name" required="true">
<mx:TextInput id="userManager" text="{xmldata.mgr}" change="xmldata.mgr = userManager.text; connector.setDirty()"/>
</mx:FormItem>
</mx:Form>
</mx:VBox>
</mx:Application>
I hope that helps.
Jasmin