Fillable PDF form - data collection
11 February 2008, 06:01 PM
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Fillable PDF form - data collection
Afternoon/Evening All,
Here's a good one for you. I do a bit of work on our sailing club website, and one thing that has come up is the electronic submittal of PDF application forms and extraction of data from within the forms
I know you can make fillable PDF files, and I have Acrobat Professional 8, so that'll handle it. Anyone know what you need to do to allow someone to fill in the form and save that filled in form locally? Is there some special permission or something you need to set in Acrobat?
This is the main form in question that we want to do stuff with.
The idea is that someone fills out the form online (we'll ignore the signature bit for the moment) and submits it. The data from the form is then emailed to someone who can then pull out the bits they want and pop them into an Excel spreadsheet, or maybe something else. The key thing being, they should not need to use the full version of Acrobat to export the data from the PDF form.
I get the idea that this is possible using the "Submit a form" action/option button when editing the form in Acrobat, and that you can specify a url for the form to link to when submit is clicked, and I'm guessing this is a CGI on the server.
What I'm looking for is advice on how best to handle this, and more specifically an idea of where to find a CGI or some other app that'll handle this. I don't have shell access to the server (I do have FTP, so I can upload things) so that is somewhat limiting.
Info/advice appreciated.
Here's a good one for you. I do a bit of work on our sailing club website, and one thing that has come up is the electronic submittal of PDF application forms and extraction of data from within the forms
I know you can make fillable PDF files, and I have Acrobat Professional 8, so that'll handle it. Anyone know what you need to do to allow someone to fill in the form and save that filled in form locally? Is there some special permission or something you need to set in Acrobat?
This is the main form in question that we want to do stuff with.
The idea is that someone fills out the form online (we'll ignore the signature bit for the moment) and submits it. The data from the form is then emailed to someone who can then pull out the bits they want and pop them into an Excel spreadsheet, or maybe something else. The key thing being, they should not need to use the full version of Acrobat to export the data from the PDF form.
I get the idea that this is possible using the "Submit a form" action/option button when editing the form in Acrobat, and that you can specify a url for the form to link to when submit is clicked, and I'm guessing this is a CGI on the server.
What I'm looking for is advice on how best to handle this, and more specifically an idea of where to find a CGI or some other app that'll handle this. I don't have shell access to the server (I do have FTP, so I can upload things) so that is somewhat limiting.
Info/advice appreciated.
11 February 2008, 06:24 PM
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11 February 2008, 07:35 PM
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Perhaps I've misread things, but the forms thing appears to be priced at $4424, which is just far, far to expensive for a small sailing club. This is ignoring the fact we'd need a server to run that on, which the club does not have.
Actually, I think we'd need the "Internet Facing Sites" version, which is ever so cheap at $22,118
Actually, I think we'd need the "Internet Facing Sites" version, which is ever so cheap at $22,118
11 February 2008, 08:06 PM
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Looking at your form, it would be fairly cheap to create a website based form, which can be filled in by your users.
When SUBMIT is clicked, the form's contents could be auto-emailed to somone at your organisation eg. your administrator ? Alternatively the form's contents could be added to a database accessible by your organisations's administrator, etc...
Plenty of people on Scoobynet who could price you for this, I would think ?
When SUBMIT is clicked, the form's contents could be auto-emailed to somone at your organisation eg. your administrator ? Alternatively the form's contents could be added to a database accessible by your organisations's administrator, etc...
Plenty of people on Scoobynet who could price you for this, I would think ?
11 February 2008, 08:08 PM
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Afternoon/Evening All,
Here's a good one for you. I do a bit of work on our sailing club website, and one thing that has come up is the electronic submittal of PDF application forms and extraction of data from within the forms
I know you can make fillable PDF files, and I have Acrobat Professional 8, so that'll handle it. Anyone know what you need to do to allow someone to fill in the form and save that filled in form locally? Is there some special permission or something you need to set in Acrobat?
This is the main form in question that we want to do stuff with.
The idea is that someone fills out the form online (we'll ignore the signature bit for the moment) and submits it. The data from the form is then emailed to someone who can then pull out the bits they want and pop them into an Excel spreadsheet, or maybe something else. The key thing being, they should not need to use the full version of Acrobat to export the data from the PDF form.
I get the idea that this is possible using the "Submit a form" action/option button when editing the form in Acrobat, and that you can specify a url for the form to link to when submit is clicked, and I'm guessing this is a CGI on the server.
What I'm looking for is advice on how best to handle this, and more specifically an idea of where to find a CGI or some other app that'll handle this. I don't have shell access to the server (I do have FTP, so I can upload things) so that is somewhat limiting.
Info/advice appreciated.
Here's a good one for you. I do a bit of work on our sailing club website, and one thing that has come up is the electronic submittal of PDF application forms and extraction of data from within the forms
I know you can make fillable PDF files, and I have Acrobat Professional 8, so that'll handle it. Anyone know what you need to do to allow someone to fill in the form and save that filled in form locally? Is there some special permission or something you need to set in Acrobat?
This is the main form in question that we want to do stuff with.
The idea is that someone fills out the form online (we'll ignore the signature bit for the moment) and submits it. The data from the form is then emailed to someone who can then pull out the bits they want and pop them into an Excel spreadsheet, or maybe something else. The key thing being, they should not need to use the full version of Acrobat to export the data from the PDF form.
I get the idea that this is possible using the "Submit a form" action/option button when editing the form in Acrobat, and that you can specify a url for the form to link to when submit is clicked, and I'm guessing this is a CGI on the server.
What I'm looking for is advice on how best to handle this, and more specifically an idea of where to find a CGI or some other app that'll handle this. I don't have shell access to the server (I do have FTP, so I can upload things) so that is somewhat limiting.
Info/advice appreciated.
11 February 2008, 09:20 PM
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Looking at your form, it would be fairly cheap to create a website based form, which can be filled in by your users.
When SUBMIT is clicked, the form's contents could be auto-emailed to somone at your organisation eg. your administrator ? Alternatively the form's contents could be added to a database accessible by your organisations's administrator, etc...
Plenty of people on Scoobynet who could price you for this, I would think ?
When SUBMIT is clicked, the form's contents could be auto-emailed to somone at your organisation eg. your administrator ? Alternatively the form's contents could be added to a database accessible by your organisations's administrator, etc...
Plenty of people on Scoobynet who could price you for this, I would think ?
The adding to the database is a nice idea, but as said, it'd need to be a cgi as the club only has a web host. As for price, it has to be free. Getting money out of the club is like getting blood from a stone.
A good question, and possibly it does not need to be a PDF file and can be your normal HTML type form, or a Joomla component that handles forms. I'm asking the chappy who wants this wether it can be changed.
To be honest, from what I've seen and know, a Joomla form component or a basic HTML form (there's some cgiemail thing on the webhost, which seems like it might also do what I want) is probably going to be the best way to do this quickly and for free.
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