Community Blogs: Ted Padova: Replicating Redundant Data

Posted: 2009-07-24

Replicating Redundant Data

Download Music Kebekelektrik Kedar Pandit Kedar Pandit and Sanjeev Abhyankar

I’ve been working on a little project in the Philippines to help the Philippine Government ease the painful process of streamlining business applications procedures. In the Philippines a prospective sole proprietor or principal in a corporation needs to file application forms with eight or more individual government departments such as Internal Revenue, Department of Trade and Industry, national health program, social security, SEC and others.

Typically a prospective business person needed to visit each department, acquire the necessary forms, and then hand write on each form all the information required by the given department. This process required individuals to fill out and complete many fields with redundant data over and over again on separate forms.

The Department of Trade and Industry approached me and asked if we might make this process easier. Since all the forms from all agencies were available in PDF format, it was easy enough to create what we have termed the Unified Form available for individuals who wish to start a sole proprietorship or corporation.

The idea here is that if we take all fields that are replicated through several forms, we would ask the form filler to make a single entry for a given field that would automatically populate all like fields on all forms.

The first task was to review all forms and create a single or two-page form having all the common fields found on agency forms. Items like name, address, business address, phone, social security number, line of business, etc. are examples of fields that appear on most forms.

Unified Form

After creating a custom form with the common fields I then combined forms together to create a single document having all forms necessary to complete the business application process.

Naming fields needed a little attention. For all fields that were automatically populated from the Unified Form page, I named the fields with a parent name of global. Hence, a name like business.name became global.business.name on all forms that were populated from the Unified Form page.

To send the data from the Unified Form to all forms having the same common fields (something like having a field business.name that requires user entry to all fields named global.business.name) we need one short JavaScript.

Open a field properties on the master page where a user types data and click the Validate tab. Click the radio button where you see Run custom validation script and click the Edit button to open the JavaScript editor.

The Validate tab

Add the script to the Validate tab. Type a single line of code such as:

this.getField("global.business.name").value = event.value;

In this script we look for all fields having the name global.business.name. The = event.value at the end of the statement means that what we type in the current field (the event.value) will appear as the result in the target field.

Using this one line of JavaScript can help you populate forms of many pages with data that needs replication. It’s easily copied and pasted in the Validate tab and all you need to do is edit the target field name.

• Acrobat 9
• Forms: Acrobat