Adobe recently announced that you can sign up to access the public beta of the next version of LiveCycle ES, and within that is the newest version of LiveCycle Designer. Here is a look at what is new for form designers;
Default Scripting Language for all forms
Ok, so you could sort of do this by making your own templates, but its a nice start.
Form Validation control
This one is cool, you can now specify at a form level how validation messages are displayed to the user, controlling things like how message boxes appear, colouring madatory fields, colour the border or background of fields that fail validation and set focus to the first item that fails.
Translation Identifiers
You can now have Designer add XLIFF identifiers to make it easier to translate the text in a form. Given that Designer forms can be saved in the XML based XDP format, you can open up the file after its designed to translate.
New locales
This one probably wont affect too many people I know but there is new support for Catalan, Basque & Tagalog
Paste options into lists
If you have data for a drop down list somewhere and you dont want to retype it you can now simply cut and paste!
Action Builder
I saved the best till last… over the last 5 years working with form designers one common feedback I get from many is that javascript is still too hard. The Designer team have come to the rescue with the new Action Builder, a wizard that allows you to add functionality that in the past would have required at least one line of code. Simply follow the wizard to perform tasks like showing / hiding a section, adding a new instance of a form, opening a web site and so on.
All up there is plenty for LiveCycle Designer users to get excited about, as well as less barriers for newcomers to the tool to start taking advantage of advanced features. Acrobat Pro users can look forward to an upgrade option as well, so sign up to access the public beta of the next version of LiveCycle ES and provide feedback today!
July 16th, 2009 at 11:32 pm
As a huge LC Designer fan I am glad to see these improvements. How has performance improved?