Concepts of Interactive Forms (SAP Library - Developing Forms Using Interactive Forms Based on Adobe Software)

Concepts of Interactive Forms

Integrated Adobe Technology

To ensure that its forms technology is available to all applications running on SAP NetWeaver, SAP has integrated two technology components provided by Adobe into SAP NetWeaver Application Server:

· Adobe LiveCycle Designer: A graphical layout tool for creating forms in an easy-to-use, drag-and-drop manner. Adobe LiveCycle Designer is fully integrated with SAP’s development environments: SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio for the development of Java-based applications, and ABAP Workbench

· Adobe document services (ADS): A set of runtime services deployed on the Application Server that provide a range of form and document creation and manipulation functions. The key capabilities of the ADS are the creation of documents in PDF and various print formats from XML form templates and current system data, and the extraction of user-entered data from interactive PDF forms.

Note

To facilitate the use of the Adobe document services capabilities in the SAP environment, SAP provides a single programmatic interface called PDF Document Object (or PDF Object), which is provided both in Java and ABAP. As an application developer, you call the PDF Object to communicate with the ADS.

SAP Development and Runtime Environments

Interactive Forms is fully integrated into SAP’s development and runtime environments. You can use Interactive Forms for different purposes in different environments

Use Cases of Interactive Forms

As Interactive Forms is integrated into a variety of different environments, your use case determines which environment is recommended. The table below provides an overview of available options.

Development with Interactive Forms

Use Case	Environment	Available with
General interactive use of forms for data capture	Web Dynpro for Java	SAP NetWeaver 04
General interactive use of forms for data capture	Web Dynpro for ABAP	SAP NetWeaver 04s
Interactive use in offline processes as part of a workflow framework	Guided Procedures	SAP NetWeaver 04s
Interactive use in online processes as part of a workflow framework	Internet Service Request	mySAP ERP 2004
High-volume printing, for example invoice or payroll runs	ABAP Workbench	SAP NetWeaver 04
Enterprise reporting, that is printing of dynamic BI tables	(function for end user)	SAP NetWeaver 04s