Adobe LiveCycle Designer Tip #3 - Checking your form bindings

The Report Palette is often forgotten hidden away at the bottom of the workspace, and the Binding tab of this palette is even more forgotten.

But this tab has several options for checking the bindings of your form, these are available when you click the palette menu button in the top right corner (circled in red in the image below).

Fields with Normal Data Binding

This is the default, but a binding option I have never really used.  All my forms are bound to a schema, so this tab has always been empty for me and for years totally ignored.

Fields with Data Binding by Reference

This is the option I need as it shows the name of the form object and the data connection SOM expression.

Fields with Global Data Binding

This lists all the fields with global binding, obviously enough.  But it also has a "Check Global Binding" button.  This will check all fields with the same name have global binding checked.

Designer seems pretty good at checking this as binding changes are made so I am not sure in what scenarios this error occurs, but if you are using global binding and it's not working this would be a good place to start.  (I only got this error because I was editing the XML Source).

Fields with No Data Binding

Gives a quick check that you have bound all the fields that you need to.

Fields with Import Data Binding

These are the fields that are passed to a web service call.

Fields with Export Data Binding

Theses are fields that are bound to the result of a web service call.

Unbound Data Connection Nodes

This is the opposite of Fields with No Data Binding, gives a quick check which nodes in the data connection have not yet been bound to a form object.

Objects with Dynamic Property Binding

This lists all the dynamic property bindings made for captions, list items and error messages.

This option also lists all the bindings that are set using the setProperty element.  This element allows most other form object properties to be set similar to dynamic property binding but are not supported by the Designer user interface. 

This is particularly handy as they can only be added using the XML Source view and can easily be forgotten. So if I wanted to set the presence of a form field using a value in the data connection I could add <setProperty target="presence" ref="$.presence"/> in the XML Source, where target is the form object property and ref is the data connection reference.

You can also use setProperty to refer to values that are not in the default data connection, values you don't want to be part of the form submission, such as <setProperty target="assist.toolTip" ref="!toolTips.value"> , note the data connection reference uses the "!" character which is the same as xfa.datasets.  so toolTips is a dataset at the same level as the default data one.