Scenario: You have created a template which you want to allow people to generate an output from. However, you want to allow the user to enter a sentence/paragraph of free text which will be inserted into the document during it’s generation.
This situation may most likely occur if you want to provide a locked PDF output, but still allow the end user to enter some text (such as a paragraph in a letter) which will change from output to output.
This is the perfect situation for User Entries. A user entry is simply a prompt to the user to enter some text which may be used as either search criteria for a query within a data group, or – as in this case – to go directly into a tag in the document as it’s being generated.
The process to do this is as follows:
1. Open the DSD which drives the template you want to allow the user to enter some free text for.
2. Create a user entry and give it an ID that you will recognise in the designer (such as “UserFreeText”) and give it a label that you wish to be shown to the end user when they attempt to generate the output.
3. Publish your DSD and then begin or open an fDocs template (and refresh the tag list if necessary). In the tag list you will see a tag that contains the same Id as your user entry you created in step 2. If you’re having trouble finding it, use the drop down filter box above the tag list to pick “Variables” which will restrict the tag list to things such as user entries.
4. Insert your free text tag at a point in the document where you want the text to appear, in the same fashion as any other tag.
When your end users then want to generate an output, they will be prompted to enter the free-text and it will appear where you have specified in the document.
