Recently in LiveCycle Category

Now all you LiveCycle documentation hunters can look at a single location to find all LiveCycle related information....on your desktop...thats right...and its actually true.

Adobe released Tour De LiveCycle yesterday, a comprehensive AIR app that locks all aspects of LiveCycle documentation on your desktop. It will remind you of Flex explorer in its look and feel but encompasses videos, presentations, tutorials and hands on examples on all aspects of livecycle (Data services, BAM, Workbench etc) .

It can be downloaded here:

I have been struggling with data manipulation with rich text fields for a while. For those who aren't familiar with rich text fields in LiveCycle, they are simple text fields with the data format = XHTML.

This allows the text field (text area) to work like Microsoft word. The end user is able to edit the text, make it bold, underline it, hyperlink web addresses etc etc.

In my case, i had to concatenate 2 pieces of rich text fields into a rich text area. The usual rawValue and formattedValue XFA properties loose the formatting if used for rich text areas.

I have attached a sample XDP that shows you how to do it  "properly".

Armaghan.
RichTextCopyExample.xdp

Time to bust a myth. I'll call it LiveCycle Myth 101.1

While working on a process orchestration today in a truly team oriented setup, we were working on a single version of a process in bits and pieces. Great progress was made, happy hour came early to work today but then someone saved had an older copy of the process open on their computer...and they decided to save it........the horror....the pain......but wait, this is livecycle we are talking about....its smart...its fancy....it must have stored the previous copy we were working with in the database...it must have...

So we went ahead with our quest for the old process, tore apart the database....and found the table that contains the process orchestrations. We found our process....the jubilant team roared, the happy hour was back....and then we diffed the copy from the database with an exported copy of the process....and it went quiet in the room....it was the same process XML.

Moral of the story:
Keep a backup of the current version, LiveCycle will not save the day everyday, sometimes it takes regular good old common sense. Export a copy of your work and save it in the SVN or better yet, create a new version of the process everytime you reach a milestone. This way, the database will save each version of the process!

Share what you learn...and Happy Coding :)