Recently my team needed to share some lead information to track data about contacts, and interactions. I thought it would be a great solution for ColdFusion and PDF Forms and wrote an application to collect and save the PDF files.


The application works as follows:

• The user logs into the ColdFusion application
• The user is presented with a Tabbed Layout showing Open and Closed leads
• The user can click on the Open leads and enter additional data, interactions
• If the user enters a close date the PDF is considered closed and is moved to the Closed folder\tab
• A user can also click the New Lead link and will be presented with a PDF with some prepopulated fields
• When the user is done editing they submit the entire PDF to CF and the file is saved on the server.
• Once any PDF is submitted into CF, it then sends an email to all users that are registered for different events

The PDF we are using in the application was built with Adobe Acrobat Form Designer. We added a Submit button to this PDF that allows us to send the entire PDF to ColdFusion. Once we have the entire PDF we are able to read the form data and make decisions on where to place the file. In our case we are looking at the close date to see if we need to remove this PDF from the Open que.

The use case can apply to any PDF form as it travels between team members, work queues, collects data, gets signed, has files attached until the PDF is finally considered complete.

You don't necessarily need to send the entire PDF, you can just as easily submit the form data with Acrobat button called the HTTP Submit. You would then need to handle prepopulating the form and data within CF before sent to the requestor.

Make sure to place the PDF repository inside a non-browsable location, to make sure it is only served via your CF application.

Instructions for installing: Download Application
1. The PDF submits to /jaxfusion/index.cfm so if you deploy to another directory you will need to change sample pdf
2. Place 3 files in a directory called jaxfusion off your web application root ie:C:\JRun4\servers\cfusion\cfusion.ear\cfusion.war\jaxfusion
3. Place the leads directory into a directory off the root. ie: C:\JRun4\servers\expertshelf\cfusion.ear\cfusion.war\Web-INF\leads
4. You will see the leadmanagement.pdf and 2 subdirecectories called open and closed inside the leads directory
5. Review settings in the application.cfm, if you placed files anywhere else you will need to make adjustments.
6. I added 2 users to a test query, you can use for testing.
7. You will need to adjust the mail settings to get notifications to work as well.

Next Steps
This design of this application was inspired after doing some work with Alfresco's Document Management. My next step is to take this application and integrate it with Alfresco's repository and user authentication features. Look for Part 2 of this application in a few weeks using Alfresco to store, version and secure the PDFs.