Change the height of a textfield that is set to "Expand to fit" dynamically in LiveCycle

Question

I'm using Adobe LiveCycle Designer to create dynamic forms which are automatically filled from an XML document. Unfortunately, I'm not very familiar with LiveCycle so I ran into a problem I cannot solve. Let me give you a simplified version of what I want to do and what I have tried so far.

I have a table with two columns, "Song" and "Lyrics". Each row of the table contains two textfields, one for the song and one for the lyrics, which are automatically populated automatically from an XML document. Unfortunately, some entries in the "Lyrics" column are too big so they expand beyond the page. In order to solve that, I wrapped each textField in a Flowed subform, and for each of them I checked the "Allow page breaks within context" option.

The problem with this approach is that the two textfields are no longer growing together. So, although I'm getting a big Lyrics which is spanning in several pages, the Song textField doesn't grow along with the Lyrics.

I was trying to find a solution for that and I realized that the only way might be to dynamically change (using Javascript) the height of the Song textfield to match the one in the Lyrics. But since the lyrics textField is set to "Expand to fit" I cannot take the height value, it always returns "0in" even though it's not.

Do you guys have any solution for getting the height of a field that is set to "Expand to fit", or maybe a better way to make the textFields grow together?

Thank you in advance for all your help

Answer 1

You have to use the following script in a layout ready event:

var heightField = xfa.layout.h(xfa.resolveNode(fieldName), "pt"));

Remember that you can access this property only in the layout ready event, when the form is rendered and so the height is effectively calculated.

In my opinion the best way to achieve your result is to put the two field in the same subform (autofit in height checkboxed) and then put the height of the two fields to the same value of the height of their parent. So, you can simply write something like that:

var heightField = xfa.layout.h(this.parent, "pt"));
this.h = heightField + "pt";