As we approach the start of the beta testing for CA Gen r8 and several CA Gen conferences in October and November, we also get closer to the newest release of our QAT Publisher software.  In case you aren’t familiar, QAT Publisher is a plug-in for CA Gen that allows you to publish information to several different media types (such as PDF, HTML, RTF, Excel etc…) without the use of external action blocks.  QAT Publisher isolates the data from the presentation, so the same data (xml) can be used to produce multiple different outputs. In the current release, layouts are produced by applying stylesheets on top of xml data created by action blocks generated with QAT Publisher. Of course, this requires a stylesheet to be designed that will reproduce the desired layout.  While this is ideal for traditional reports, it can be tedious when it comes to forms that generally have more sophisticated positioning, graphical elements and/or large amounts of static text.  For example, consider IRS forms or even a simple “Authorization for Direct Deposit” form. Well, QAT Publisher 2010 has a new feature that greatly simplifies the publication of PDF Forms.  The data for PDF Forms is retrieved using the same approach as other publication types.  However, the form is designed (or even scanned) as a template and the fields are named on that form.  A new custom function was added to QAT Publisher that will generate a copy of the form with the data applied to each named field. 

This new feature will greatly simplify the development of PDF Forms with CA Gen.  Without using externals, you retrieve data using your CA Gen application and with a few calls to action blocks generated by QAT Publisher have that data transferred to a PDF form. As with the other publication types, PDF Forms will be available for C, Java and .Net.

I’ll be at the EDGEucate 2009 conference in Plano so I hope you’ll stop by and ask me for a demo !

Alex