Intro
Sometimes IT is called in to fix things we know little or nothing about. We may fix it, still not know anything, except what we did to fix it, and move on. Such is the case here with a mysterious Adobe Form that wasn’t working when I was called in to a meeting to discuss it.
The Case
One of our developers created a simple Adobe Acrobat form document. It has some logic to ask for a username and password and then verify them against an LDAP server using a network connection. Or at least that was the theory. It worked fine and then we got new PCs running Windows 7 and it stopped working. They asked me for help.
I asked to get a copy of the form because I like to test on my desktop where I am free to try dumb things and not waste others’ time. Initially I thought I also had the error. They showed me how to turn on Javascript debugging in edit|preferences. The debug window popped up with something like this:
debug 5 : function setConstants debug 5 : data.gURL = https://b2bqual.drjohnstechtalk.com/invoke/Drjohns_Services.utilities:httpPostToBackEnd debug 5 : function today_ymd debug 5 : mrp::initialize: version 0.0001 debug level = 5 debug 5 : Login clicked debug 5 : calling LDAPQ debug 5 : in LDAPQ NotAllowedError: Security settings prevent access to this property or method. SOAP.request:155:XFA:data[0]:mrp[0]:sub1[0]:btnLogin[0]:clic |
But this wasn’t the real problem. In this form you get a yellow bar at the top along with this message and you give approval to the form to access what it needs. Then you run it again.
For me, then, it worked. I knew this because it auto-populated some user information fields after taking a few seconds.
So i worked with a couple people for whom it wasn’t working. One had Automatically detect proxy settings checked. Unfortunately the new PCs came this way and it’s really not what we want. We prefer to provide a specific PAC file. With the auto-detect unchecked it worked for this guy.
The next guy said he already had that unchecked. I looked at his settings and confirmed that was the case. However, in his case he mentioned that Firefox is his default browser. He decided to change it back to Internet Explorer. Then he tested and lo and behold. It began to work for him as well!
When it wasn’t working he was seeing an error:
NetworkError: A network connection could not be created.
Later he realized that in Firefox he also was using auto-detect for the proxy settings. When he switched that to Use System Settings all was OK and he could have FF as default browser and get this form to work.
Conclusion
This is speculation on my part. I guess that our new version of Acrobat Reader X, v 10.1.1, is not competent in interpreting the auto-detect proxy setting, and that it is also tripped up by the proxy settings in Firefox.
There’s a lot more I’d like to understand about what was going on here, but sometimes speed counts. The next problem is already calling my name…