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Hello,
I am the developer of a funding application system for the California Dairy Research Foundation that was launched last year. The system is based on FormidablePro and has various forms and views. It uses the Formidable Pro PDF Extended add-in to generate PDFs. The primary application form is long and complex, with many repeated sections that are only made visible when needed (e.g., selecting the number of team members from a popup menu causes that many team member sections to be displayed in the form). As part of the workflow, an applicant fills out the form, saves a draft, and then clicks a link to generate a PDF from the draft. The applicant then prints that PDF, gets it signed, and then scans it and uploads the scan back to the form BEFORE submitting the form for foundation review. Since many of the repeated sections are blank, conditional logic is used to leave the blank sections out of the generated PDF, which would otherwise be too long to process.I understand that your plugin currently doesn’t generate the PDF but rather maps the web form data into the PDF form. Would it be possible for me to hide some sections of the PDF form programmatically (e.g., by conditionally setting the display field object property of the PDF)?
Would there be a problem caused by our requirement of using a draft entry rather than a submitted entry for the data to make the PDF?
Thanks.
Michael Hauser
Hello Mr. Hauser,
Great question, thank you for trying the PRO2PDF plugin.
Without further programming, you could dynamically change the “Layout ID” in the shortcode, allowing you to map multiple PDF forms with only the required data fields in variations of your main form.
For quick execution I would;
. Upload all PDF form variations
. Create a Layout and Map the “full” PDF form – with all required fields
. Create a copy of the layout (button at bottom of the Field Map Designer) for each variation of the “full” PDF form
. Delete the unwanted field mappings from the new layouts
. Create a field in the Formidable Form for the “Layout ID” which dynamically changes based on the conditional logic.Creating PDF’s in a Saved Draft is accomplished by placing the PRO2PDF shortcode in the Messages|Saved Draft section of the Formidable Form Settings|General screen.
We remain at your service, let us know if you need more assistance – or a different solution.
While discussing possible options we came to a question. If we add the functionality of hiding PDF form fields the document would be blank in the section where the field is placed. Would that be your desired result? Or are you looking to “build” the PDF file whereby the display field property would be used to change the placement of other fields?