Last year one of my clients wanted to allow people to fill out property rental forms online. I built a web-based form, and then took that data and inserted it into a PDF, so I could provide a completed rental form that looks just like the ones they use at the office when printed.
That worked fine. Then my client wanted to have a PDF-based form that looked just like their rental app. I advised against it because there were issues that came up in my testing using a PDF form. My client instisted. It was a pretty big form and was quite CPU intensive to process. Many site visitor's computers apparently couldn't handle the process of using a PDF and the result was too many failed PDF form submissions, and lost rental opportunities. I'm in the process now of reverting the system back to a form-based user interface, which then takes the form data and inserts it into a PDF for my client, which will work fine, as it did before. My experience has been that PDF-based forms are much more difficult to process, their performance and display is inconsistent across browsers, and they take MUCH longer to download initially and process than do web-based forms, making users think often that something is wrong and they don't wait long enough for the form to download. Users aren't used to PDF forms nearly as much as they are web-based forms. I see only negatives, based on my experience with using a PDF form. My advice is don't use a PDF form on the client side. After a regular form is submitted, then you can do whatever you like with the data...create a PDF, enter the data into a database, email the data, whatever. Rick -----Original Message----- From: Scott Spurlock [mailto:spurlock.sc...@yahoo.com] Sent: Wednesday, July 13, 2011 3:14 PM To: cf-talk Subject: Adobe Solution? I apologize in advance since this isn't a CF question, but I'm desperate and hoping this is at least an Adobe question. A client of mine wants to create a form for users to fill out electronically. He then wants to take their responses (attached via email) and upload the data to an Access 2007 database. He absolutely does not want this to be web-based. He ideally wanted me to create an interactive form in PDF. I thought, "Sure, no problem." The problems I'm running into? Importing PDF data into Access appears to involve an extra step (converting the PDF to text or XML or Excel) which he/the client would have to do (since he's the one getting the returned forms). Worse is that he wants some multi-select drop-down lists in the form and I'm not seeing a way to do this in a PDF (I've played around with both Acrobat Pro and LiveCycle Designer). And without VBA skills I don't have, I'm not even seeing how to do this in an Excel or Word form. I'm getting stuck and turn to you kind sirs for your advice. How would you do this? Tha ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Order the Adobe Coldfusion Anthology now! http://www.amazon.com/Adobe-Coldfusion-Anthology/dp/1430272155/?tag=houseoffusion Archive: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-talk/message.cfm/messageid:346216 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-talk/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-talk/unsubscribe.cfm
