confirmation dialog (alert) after form submit - pdf

Question

I was wondering if there is any way to notify a user in adobe reader
that a pdf form has been submitted to the server? I am submitting a
normal http/html form to a php script no big deal, straight forward,
but there seems to be a big "black hole" in documentation, forums etc.
as to what happens when the form is submitted.
Isn't there a way to trigger a javascript alert after I have submitted
a form?? I dont't want to return another pdf that says "thank you",
that is a bit tacky. I am very new to pdf forms so I am guessing there
must be a way to return FDF to the original document that has some
javascript in it that is executed eg alert('thank you for your
feedback!')..
This should really be straight forward, I assumed Adobes much hyped
PDF technology was much more developer freindly and accessible..
Any ideas?? (Oh and please don't ask why I am using pdf forms and not the web, this is coming from "The Top", so as a developer I just have to do it..)

Answer 1

The server script which you are posting to must reply with this content type in the HTTP header:
'Content-Type: application/vnd.fdf'
eg. If you are using PHP:
header('Content-Type: application/vnd.fdf')
followed by the relevant bastardized-pdf-javascript-mutant-half-bread that will trigger the alert() dialog.
%FDF-1.2
1 0 obj
<<
/FDF
<<
/JavaScript
<<
/Doc 2 0 R
/After (confirmSend();)
>>
>>
>>
endobj
2 0 obj
[
(confirmSend) 3 0 R
]
endobj
3 0 obj
<<
>>
stream
function confirmSend()
{
app.alert({
cTitle : 'title of the window',
cMsg : 'message',
nIcon : 3
});
}
endstream
endobj
trailer
<<
/Root 1 0 R
>>
%%EOF
I hope you receive this message, as I wasted nearly 2 weeks of my life finding a solution...

Answer 2

Thanks for this! I too have been searching for a solution to this for hours! It was extremely frustrating. It seems like overkill to install the FDF Toolkit just to get a simple confirmation dialog box after the PDF has been submitted.
I eventually came up with the following through trial and error (it seems there is absolutely no documentation about this on the net):
%FDF-1.2
%âãÏÓ
1 0 obj
<<
/FDF
<<
/Status(Thank you. Your details have been submitted and someone will get in touch with regarding your application.)
>>
>>
endobj
trailer
<</Root 1 0 R>>
%%EOF
The above will present (or should present) a dialog box in Adobe Reader without showing the "Warning: JavaScript Window" warning.
Hope this ends up being useful to someone.

Answer 3

I wrangled with this for days, trying to figure out why when I sent the FDF using response.write, it just wouldn't display in Reader. I tried sending both hand-crafted FDF and installing the FDF toolkit to create the FDF response. I was able to create valid FDF, as I was able to open locally in Reader and have the pop-up display correctly but I couldn't get it to work for the life of me sending FDF from my ASP.NET page.
Then inspiration struck. In one of my attempts to send the FDF, I stored the FDF in a file and tried to use a streamreader to pump it into the response. After many unsuccessful attempts to use response.write, on a whim I tried response.redirect to the saved fdf file and it worked. I had previously added fdf as a registered MIME extension for my web site, with application/vnd.fdf as the MIME type. Now the user receives the pop-up after successful submission. The simple solution, in C#, looks like this:
Page.Response.Redirect("success.fdf");

Answer 4

I managed to happen upon the answer after 3 days of searching, adding a header for fdf file in the php script, adding '#FDF' to the end of the url in acrobat seems to have been the solution;
%FDF-1.2
1 0 obj
<<
/FDF
<<
/JavaScript
<<
/Doc 2 0 R
/After (confirmSend();)
>
>
>
endobj
2 0 obj
[
(confirmSend) 3 0 R
]
endobj
3 0 obj
<<
>
stream
function confirmSend()
{
app.alert("The form has been successfully submitted\nThank you for your feedback!", 3);
}
endstream
endobj
trailer
<<
/Root 1 0 R
>
%%EOF