Posting source code on Wordpress.com hosted blogs

The one plugin I loved from hosting my own Wordpress.org blog was the excellent SyntaxHighlighter plugin.  After trying to replicate it on Wordpress.com I eventually found that it's already baked in but woefully under documented. Follow the link below for the documentation on how to start using it:

http://en.support.wordpress.com/code/posting-source-code/

Acrobat Reader Extension limitations

I've been doing a piece of work for a customer who wanted a simple form distributed around their organisation for staff to fill in and return.  The only additional requirement was that end users need to be able to save the document whilst filling it in.  Most of my work to date has been using the Adobe LiveCycle product suite and so I naturally turned to Reader Extensions ES2 which would give end users the ability to save documents offline but comes at a rather large premium in terms of licence costs.

Displaying Base64 images in Designer

A recent project required me to write a custom component to merge image data with some text.  This was simple enough in itself but testing the output Base64 image data with PDF files proved a pain.  As a result I made a very simple PDF in Designer which allows you to test your Base64 encoded image strings to see how they'll look in a PDF document.  The following link will let you download the form which can be opened in designer.  The archive also contains a very basic data schema and test data to get you started.  Just replace the Base64 string in the "sampleData.xml" file with your own string.  Fire up Designer and click the Preview tab to see if the image is displaying properly.

Download Base64ImageTest.zip

Back from my travels

After a fantastic 2 months travelling SE Asia and Australia I'm finally back in the UK.  Unfortunately my web hosting expired during my travels so I had to move my Wordpress database over to wordpress.com (not easy on a slow Vietnamese computer in downtown Saigon!).  A few things seem to have been lost in the transfer such as the plugins I had for displaying code and the theme I was using but other than that it seems fine.  Gone are the days when I used to love hosting my own websites; it's just so much less hassle to have it hosted and maintained on your behalf!  If I get on with wordpress.com then I'll restore my domain name to permanently point here (they make you pay for the privilege!).

Just about to embark on some custom component work for a large public sector organisation so expect some more posts on that area soon.

Relative vs Absolute paths for Form fragments

Here's another gotcha when using LiveCycle Output ES2 that's had me stumped for a few hours.  I designed a form which used a number of fragments which tested fine within designer.  Once deployed to the server I was always getting blank forms.  A quick check of the logs revealed the following warning:

ALC-OUT-002-058: Cannot retrieve the resource from Repository Path.

A bit of digging around and I hit the a knowledge base article on Adobe's site.  Basically there's a "limitation" with the way the form is compiled which means relative paths within fragments and XDPs can cause problems.  The solution is to turn the relative path references (which are inserted by default in Designer) into absolute paths.  Doing this sorted the problem for me but this is something that needs fixing!

Blank screen when opening process in Workbench

Back to working with LiveCycle ES2 on a new project and had problems opening any process after installed Workbench ES2 on my laptop.  When opening a process in Workbench ES2 I was being shown a grey tab with no content.  The workaround seems to be to run Workbench as an Administrator (right click on icon > Run as Administrator).  Solved the problem but don't know why it needs it!

Connecting to LiveCycle ES2 Repository outside of Workbench

When trying to test some forms I was struggling to remember the location of the LiveCycle repository.  Turns out that you can access it via WebDav from Windows or directly from a browser using the following:

[code]

http://<server_name>:<port>/repository

[/code]

Login with your usual username and password and you'll be able to browse the repository hierarchy.