Adobe Acrobat 7.0.5, Manual

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Acrobat SDK User’s Guide
85
Forms and the Acrobat SDK
Collecting Data from Completed Forms
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Collecting Data from Completed Forms
XML and XDP Formats
You can save your form data in pure XML format, or, to take advantage of the rich
functionality offered by the XFA plug-in, you can save your forms in the XML Data Package
format (XDP).
The XDP format allow you to package units of PDF content within a surrounding XML
container, and is thus considered an XML-based companion to PDF. The advantage of this
format is that it provides XML parsers direct access to the XML form-data subassembly of
the PDF document.
For more information, see the Acrobat JavaScript Scripting Guide .
FDF and XFDF Formats
Using Acrobat JavaScript, form data can be saved in either FDF or XFDF format in a separate
file which can subsequently be used in the next step within your workflow. This approach
minimizes the file size to just the amount needed to store your data, thus decreasing
network traffic and processing time for the next step in the workflow.
For more information, see the Acrobat JavaScript Scripting Guide .
Saving Data to a Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet
Once you’ve collected PDF form data in FDF or XML format from multiple users, you can
organize the form data into a comma-delimited spreadsheet file (CSV). After exporting the
form data to a CSV file, you can work with the data in a spreadsheet application, such as
Microsoft Excel.
You can also save form data as a tab-delimited file. Tab-delimited files can also be imported
using
doc object methods.
Submitting Data from Attachments
Data from various attachments can be imported into an XML or XFA-based document, and
submitted to a server for processing.
Exporting Data as Images
Since images are their own fields, they can be exported in any of the standard image types
using the
doc object’s exportDataObject method. If the image is to be used again, it
can be imported as an icon in any of the standard formats: BMP, GIF, JPEG, PCX, PNG, or TIFF.