For developers building and extending desktop, server and browser based applications, we supply a wide range of components, that allow you to incorporate powerful E-Form and E-Document handling.

 

You design your blank form templates using our WYSIWG forms design package, or let us design them for you.

 

With a library of blank form templates, you can then draw upon different software elements, depending on your requirements:

 

Core E-Form ActiveX Component

 

This component allows your code to open blank forms populate them with data, handle user form viewing, filling, validating, data extraction and high quality printing. The component is supplied as an ActiveX component.

 

When this component is added to your desktop application project, all of the features of E-Forms and E-documents can be controlled using simple code. Although simple, the code has masses of power with literally hundreds of programming methods, events and properties at your programmers disposal.

 

With E-forms under the control of your application, programmers can build your own viewer/filler applications to exactly meet your application's needs. We also supply a ready-made viewer/filler application which can used by your application.

 

The core ActiveX component can is also use on server applications, for opening and manipulating form files. It can be used for batch printing document sets.

 

Packager Component

 

The package component is used in conjunction with a desktop application.

 

The packager component allows filled forms to be packaged together into a single file. This file can then be sent to remote locations or returned to base by email, ftp or http transfer. Users of you desktop application can therefore send and receive packages of forms and documents, to be stored, viewed, printed, etc. The advantage of the packager adds key benefits:

• Files are encrypted and password protected. Even if sent across the open internet, they remain secure from prying eyes.
• Form packages can contain many different forms and documents, and also additional attachments, such as photos, word documents, etc
• Form packages can be created by a server "on the fly".

Browser E-form Component

 

Form templates are opened within an unmodified browser. The browser e-form component presents an API, which you can control using browser scripting.

 

If you wish you can write your own viewer/filler application to control the form, alternatively, we supply a pre-written viewer/filler, which is also supplied as our internet forms product.

 

E Signature Component

 

This software presents users with a signing window, when they click into a signature field in an E-form. It captures their signature as they write on a signing pad, encodes it in data, and embeds the encoded image in the document.

 

XML Toolkit

 

Our form data is produced in a simple, open XML format, which can easily be read and manipulated by your own code. However, if your application requires form data to be formatted according to a complex XML schema, writing the code to do this manually is very, very time-consuming.

 

Our XML Toolkit is a software add-on which dramatically cuts development time:

 

1. Import an XML schema document into our system - you can use third-party XML editing tool such as XML Spy to view, create and edit these.
2.  Open the form design file with our design software, and add the XML element tags to data fields - this maps form data to the XML document.
3.  Where necessary, addition functions can be called to define how form data is handled during the conversion to XML (specifiying date format, specifying attributes of an element, etc).
4.  When your application receives form data, you code can then invoke the XML generation software - it converts it into complex XML format as defined by the imported schema.

 

PDF Output Component

 

Our PDF output converter is an ActiveX object which works as an add-on to the Core E-form component. It converts forms and data in our own format into industry standard PDF, flat and fill-able. It works with desktop applications, and running as an unattended server process.

 

For internet applications that require PDF document generation that uses the PDF Output Component, we supply a ready-made solution - the PDF Document Server.

 

 

Application Developers

These components are intended for programmers who wish to add E-form facilities to applications they are writing - whether desktop or internet based applications.

In many cases we can supply ready-made products, which remove the need for programmers to work at component level.

The components are available if programmers who want to work "under the hood" with the technology to take our software into new areas.