This blog talks about a scenario wherein we integrated SAP Interactive Forms by Adobe with SAP Master Data Management alongwith Netweaver Portal for a centralization scenario. 

We started our development with the designing of Inteactive forms using Adobe Lifecycle Designer and then integrating into a Web Dynpro Java Development Component. We created a dynamic Interactive forms with a paper like look an feel for raising a Create/Change Request for Customer and Supplier Master Data. Initially we used the ACF based forms, but soon faced issues with the Active Component Framework (ACF) plugin on client machines and it was not possible to install the plugin on each machine as the forms were used by a large variety of users who were not very technical in nature. To overcome this shortcoming, we moved on to the ZCI forms and it wored as these version of Interactive Fors were platform independent and also did not required any client side installation.

We recieved a very positive feedback from the user community for Interactive Forms as they were simila to traditional paper based forms and supported features such as Offline Form filling. Users were given a choice to download the form from the intranet postal with all the data populated from the MDM, after filling it offline the users had an option to upload the offline form and create a request in MDM. Several dynamic validations were used to restrict the improper data entry in the offline forms as well as we used online validations that were done at the time of form upload.

 Overall it was a good experience apart from the Adobe Document Services (Required for rendering Interactive Forms at runtime) that presented issues now and then and we spent quite sometime resolving those issues.