What's New in LiveCycle ES4 Service Pack 1

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Download the Service Pack installer from the Adobe Licensing Website. For installation instructions see, Adobe LiveCycle ES4 Service Pack 1 installation instructions and fixed issues document.

Release Highlights

Support for Java 7 and Other Platforms

With this service pack, the support for Java 7 update 25 and later versions has been added to LiveCycle ES4.

In addition, a number of updates have been made to the list of supported application servers, databases, operating systems, and other platforms. For the latest updates, see Adobe LiveCycle ES4 Supported Platforms.

Forms Portal Integration Package

Forms Portal Integration Package is an AEM package that provides AEM components to portal developers for creating, managing, and customizing the publishing of forms on a web page. The package integrates the forms portal with Forms Manager where your forms are stored. It allows developers to define how the published portal appears to the end users and how they search and interact with the portal.  

For details, see Introduction to Forms Portal Integration Package.

Process Reporting

Process Reporting is a web browser-based tool that you use to create reports on LiveCycle processes and tasks. It provides a set of out-of-the-box reports that allow you to filter, view, and analyze information on long running processes, process duration, and workflow volume. Also, the Process Reporting user interface can be augmented to display custom reports.

For details, see Introduction to Process Reporting.

Mobile Workspace Startpoints

A startpoint represents the invocation of an instance of a process that is created in Adobe LiveCycle Workbench. You can now initiate a LiveCycle process in the Mobile Workspace app by using Mobile startpoints.

For details, see Working with Startpoints.

Mobile Workspace iOS7 and Android support

LiveCycle Mobile Workspace app now supports iOS 7 and Android Jelly Bean and above devices.

For details on how to set up and build the app, see:

• for iOS: Set up the Xcode project and build the installer
• for Android: Set up the Eclipse project and build the installer
  

Accessibility Checker 

An accessible form is one that a wide range of people can use, including those with disabilities that affect how they are able to interact with the form on a computer screen. You can now use the Accessibility Checker to test the accessibility of your LiveCycle Designer forms against a set of accessibility rules.

For details, see Checking the accessibility of a form.

LiveCycle Home

LiveCycle Home lists installed LiveCycle user interfaces on a single web page. It is a gateway to log in to LiveCycle user interfaces using single sign-on (SSO).

For details, see Introduction to LiveCycle Home.

More Features and Enhancements

Mobile Forms

Significant improvements in table support.

Many new APIs are added to enhance layouting, accessibility, scripting a wider array of actions, form styles, and the overall user experience. For details, see Scripting support.

Form developers can now specify the location of the proxy servlet which interacts with HTML Forms. Using this, you can run server-side scripts and web services, as well as, submit forms. For details, see Scripting support.

Widgets now have access to more XFA properties to provide richer experience to the user. Developers can extend the default implementation to create new widgets. For details, see Plug in custom widgets with Mobile Forms.

Users now have the ability to increase or decrease the page size. Empty pages are not displayed and page height adjusts for hidden or removed content.

Based on their branding needs, users can now customize the user interface elements header, footer, and toolbar individually. For details, see Creating a Custom Profile.

Right-to-left languages are now supported.

Look and feel and layouting of forms is enhanced because of improvements in the pixel rendering.

You can configure HTML Forms to get ES4 behavior. The forms behave as they do in the older release, without leveraging the enhancements of the newer release. For details, see Compatibility mode.

Process Management

Mobile Workspace

In addition to Mobile Workspace startpoints, the following enhancements have been made in Mobile Workspace:

The LiveCycle server URL is now cached in the server URL list. This enables you to select from the list of previously accessed LiveCycle servers. For details, see Logging in to the Mobile Workspace.

The Home screen now displays with the Processes tab selected in the tab pane to the left of the screen. The list view on the right displays the list of all the Mobile Startpoints defined in LiveCycle Workbench. For details, see Home screen.

You can change the default Home screen of the app either from General Settings tab on the Settings screen of the app or from the Preference tab on HTML Workspace. For details, see General Settings.

The forms associated with the tasks in the Mobile Workspace are now downloaded to the device when you synchronize the device with the LiveCycle server.
For details, see General Settings.

You now have the option to select whether you want to download to your device the Mobile Start points defined in the LiveCycle Workbench. For details, see General Settings. 

When you switch the Fetch Attachments option on, the Mobile Workspace app downloads the attachments associated with the task when downloading the task. Now, the app also downloads the attachments associated with tasks previously downloaded to the mobile device. For details, see General Settings. For details, see General Settings. 

HTML Workspace

If a form uses Prepare Data Process, some information can be pre-populated in a blank form, when a new process is initiated.

Information entered by a user can be automatically saved as a draft in the Workspace. For details, see Getting started with LiveCycle HTML Workspace.

Besides some minor changes to the existing APIs, two new APIs are added to search for just groups or users and to search for groups. For details, see APIs used in HTML Workspace.

In HTML WS index.html has been replaced with html.jsp. This results in minor change in the customizations steps. For details, see Generic steps for HTML Workspace customization.

A refresh icon in the list of tasks in the To-Do tab allows you to refresh the listing.

Forms Manager

You can now use Forms Manager to manage PDF and Print forms. For details, see Introduction to Forms Manager.

You can now remotely search across multiple Forms Manager applications. When searching for forms remotely, it also allows you to sort the search results returned by Forms Manager. For details, see Searching forms remotely.

Advanced search options are added to Forms Manager that let you limit your search results to specific type of one or more supported form types and resources. For details, see Searching across forms.

Render Format option allows you to set PDF, HTML, or HTML and PDF, as the output. By default, you can render in both, HTML and PDF formats. For details, see Previewing a form using Forms Manager.

Uploading sample data to a form is no longer supported. To check the appearance of a form, you can upload custom sample data when rendering a form. For details, see Previewing a form using Forms Manager.

Assets are synchronized in the CRX repository asynchronously now. This allows for faster LCA uploads and faster update of the CRX repository. You can change this back to synchronous update. For details, see Configuring Forms Manager.

Correspondence Management Solution

To improve the performance of the Export functionality, the assets in the Correspondence Management solution are now exported to a .cmp format as against the previous .zip format.

To improve the performance of rendering of letters in the Create Correspondence user interface, the solution now implements the LRU (least recently used) caching algorithm. In caching assets, the solution caches layout and fragment layouts to the local file system. While letter instances are cached in-memory.

For details, see Caching in the Correspondence Management solution.

The navigation panel of the Create Correspondence user interface allows you to navigate through the editable text modules contained in a letter. For details, see Navigating editable text modules.

The Find and Replace feature allows you to search for (and replace) any string of text in a text element. The feature also includes a powerful regular expression search. For details, see Searching and replacing text.

You can specify if the data entry for a field or variable is multi-line. If you select this option, the input box for the field or variable displays as multi-line input box in the Data Editing View. The field or variable also displays as multi-line in the Data and Content views in the Create Correspondence user interface. For details, see Multi-line data entry.

You can specify if the value for field or variable is optional or mandatory. For details, see Mandatory / Optional field.

To provide enhanced validation of the value of a field or variable, you can assign a validator to the field or variable. For details, see Field / Variable Validators.

The variables and fields in the Data view of the Create Correspondence user interface display in the same order as they appear in the Letter. For details, see Ordering of elements in Create Correspondence interface and Data Editing view.

By default, if you open a letter instance in the Create Correspondence user interface, you have the options to view the letter in the Data view or the Content view. You can now customize the default view (data or content) for the letter instance. You can also customize the view to display either the data or content view. For details, see Customize the Create Correspondence user interface view options.

LiveCycle Designer

In addition to Accessibility Checker, the following enhancements have been made in LiveCycle Designer:

You can now add the document title to the PDF title bar. If a user opens the PDF, the document title will display on the title bar of the window. For details, see Add document title to the PDF title bar.

Rights Management

You can now specify that a user will have offline access to only those documents that the user has opened online at least once. For details, see Allow offline access per document.

You can now update the config.xml to disable all external links from the Right Management user interfaces. For details, see Disabling external links.

Assembler

LiveCycle now adds the support for PDF/A-3b standard for archiving. You can specify the PDF/A compliance as either PDF/A-1b, PDF/A-2b, and PDF/A-3b. For more information, see Assembler Service and DDX Reference.

System Information Service

System information service is a service that uses REST APIs to retrieve and provide information about LiveCycle environment, such as properties, logs, and installation details. It is helpful in monitoring your LiveCycle system and debugging errors. For details, see System information service.

Fixed Issues

There are a number of customer-reported issues fixed in this service pack. For a complete list, see the Issues Fixed section of the service pack installation instructions document.