Temporarily Disabling Validation

Question

Hi,
I have a form which requires validation prior to it's final submission (fields must be populated, etc).
However, in order to pre-populate some of these fields, we also need to be able to submit the form to an external CRM to retrieve the FDF data for the form to be incorporated.
When doing this, the form is validated, and since there is no data yet, the submission fails and pre-population fails.
Is there any way to temporarily disable the validation of the form for the pre-population-submission, and then turn it back on following that?
The property xfa.host.validationsEnabled seems like a good candidate, but setting it to false doesn't seem to have any impact.
Cheers,
Martin

Answer 1

Thanks for providing me with that sample of your code. I can see what's happening but I don't know for sure why those fields you're making optional are remaining mandatory. It could be a timing issue (i.e. Acrobat's Object Model hasn't been updated with the mandatory to optional changes by the time you attempt to submit the form).
I can think of two possible solutions:
[Easiest of the two solutions] Since mandatory fields are flagged when they're null (when you haven't entered anything into them, which is the case on the Form:Ready event where you're executing the code which pre-submits the form to get the FDF data) and the problem you're getting is that Acrobat won't let you submit the form because it thinks some fields are mandatory, I would make all the fields optional and use Validation scripts like the one on the TextField. This way, you'll be able to pre-submit the form because all field values will be null initially and validations don't fail on null values because they aren't executed. This, however, will be a problem when the user submits the form via email because the email submit button will work even if one of the field's value is null (but now you want to make sure it's filled-in). To solve this problem, you would need to place a fake email submit button on the form (which is just a regular button), hide the real email submit button and put some validation code in its Click event. This validation code would verify that all fields contain valid data and aren't null. If this fails, you can show an error message and stop there. If all field values are acceptable, then you would execute the hidden email submit button's Click event in order to cause the form to be submitted via email:
EmailSubmitButton1.execEvent("click");
[My least-favored solution] You could try setting all fields to optional in the Form:Ready event and move your code to pre-submit and get the FDF data into an
invisible (not hidden or else Acrobat won't let you modify its properties at runtime) text field's Validate event. The Validate event on the invisible text field would have some guards to prevent it from executing every time a field's value changes on the form. When setting fields as optional, this would cue the execution of form validations (validation scripts on Validate events) and, if certain guards are properly set, would let your pre-submit code run. It's very complicated and difficult to explain but here's a thread to which I posted a similar solution (with a sample file) which uses this approach to import XML data into a form and display a summarized output in a table:
Grouping and Summation. See post #5 in that thread.
Let me know if you have any questions.
Stefan
Adobe Systems