Digital Signatures ES. Avoid the Mines!

LiveCycle Signatures ES allows you to Certify PDF documents and interactive Forms, validate Recipient Signatures on a Form and also use the server to apply Signatures to your Forms.

In this article I would like to add a few warnings and offer best practices for using LiveCycle Signatures ES in your server applications and work flows. That is, server applications that need to participate in the creation and validation of Digital Signatures, not just relying on Acrobat/Reader at the client for all Signature work.

There are actually many file format variations behind the types of “PDF Form” that you might use with LiveCycle. In order to use Digital Signatures successfully on the server, you need to know the exact file format that you are using and know exactly what you can and cannot do depending on that file format.

There are mines lying in wait, but with a map you can get around them.

Mine #1 Certifying a Dynamic XML Form: Recording

Avoid the Mine using a Static XML Form (or upcoming Reader 9): Recording

<More mines coming this week>

How many ways can you call a Web Service?

One of the simplest yet most useful aspects of the LC ES Service model is that all Services have a WSDL; be they Services that we provide out of the box, Services that you write using custom component development or even processes that you author using Workbench. One problem is that there are so many ways that you can actually call a Web Service. Our SDK Guru Scott MacDonald has put together a great new guide for writing applications that call LiveCycle Web Services: Latest Web Service Guide

Plugs

I am shamelessly plugging this for the Acrobat Users Group The PDF Forms and LiveCycle Designer templates Contest is an opportunity to win yourself some prizes while sharing examples of your PDF Forms design and/or technical expertise. See here for more information.

Also Girish Bedekar (legend from the Adobe Forums!) has launched a Blog with samples for LiveCycle. Check it out. Girish’s Blog 

Using LDAP in a LiveCycle Process

One of the most common use cases for LiveCycle ES is to provide Services that auto complete field information in forms. For example, an employee’s name and address or manager name etc. This is typically done by authoring an LiveCycle Service that queries your corporate LDAP Server. Then the LiveCycle Service is invoked as a Web Service by the Form in response to a button push or tab transition

In this demo, we look at the basics for authoring a LiveCyce process that uses LDAP to get information you typically need for a Form. Then we look at how that Service is exposed by LiveCycle via a WSDL for binding to the Form. I also show a little bit of Reader Extensions and how to configure secure web services.

Part 1 -Introduction, Start writing a simple LDAP based process: http://my.adobe.acrobat.com/p18043768/

Part 2 -Expand the process to use multiple LDAP searches: http://my.adobe.acrobat.com/p11371597/

Part 3 -Call as a secure Web Service from a Form: http://my.adobe.acrobat.com/p68963614/

If you would like more detail/background on Workbench, check out the  Best Practice guide on Adobe Developer Connection and on Greg Wilson’s Blog