Acrobat Forms and Zope (Part 1)

Created by . Last modified on 2003/08/05.

Introduction

This is a beginning of a series of How-To's in deploying Acrobat Forms on Zope.

What are Acrobat forms?

Acrobat Forms are Acrobat documents with special form fields added to allow users to fill forms in over the web. Acrobat (not the Reader) is required to create forms. Users with Acrobat Reader can fill in forms.

For more information see the Acrobat web site.

Step by step guide

1. In Acrobat, open an existing PDF file, and create the following fields in the document:Name, Telephone, Address.

2. Create a BUTTON called submit, and set its Action onMouseUp to URL:http:\\localhost\fdfhtmlpost, and its Action type to HTML post
   [download one]

3. Save this file as pdfsample.pdf

4. Start up Zope to run on port 80
   start -w 80

5. upload this pdfsample.pdf into any folder

6. in the root folder, create a dtml document
   

That's it! Now test it by opening the form from your web site. (You will require Acrobat Reader for this). Press the submit button, and you should see that the data on the form has been posted to Zope, and you are free to manipulate it.