Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Acrobat -- Create Dependent Dropdowns


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There are many instances where you might want to have dependent dropdowns (or combo-boxes, as they're sometimes called) in your PDF form, to provide the users of the form with a limited set of pre-defined option to choose from. This can be, for example, a set of clients and contact people, or a set of product categories and specific products, or even a list of countries and then cities within each country.

Creating such dependent drop-downs is complex and requires scripting knowledge, but now you can set up such a system with ease. All you have to do is use this script to select the relevant fields and then enter the primary and secondary items. The script will take care of the rest for you!

Here's how it looks like: First of all you select the 2 fields...



If the primary field already contains items, they will automatically be added to the first list.
Then you enter the primary and secondary values, either one by one, or multiple items (which also allows you to copy and paste text from other applications or files). 


Adding a single item to the Primary Data list (click to enlarge)

Adding multiple items to the Primary Data List (click to enlarge)


Adding multiple items to the Secondary List (click to enlarge)


And after you click OK, the values are immediately applied to the selected boxes:





For more information about this tool, you can contact me directly.