Acrobat JavaScript, Introduction to Acrobat JavaScript, Acrobat JavaScript Scripting Guide

Interacting with Databases

Introduction to ADBC

Acrobat JavaScript provides an ODBC-compliant object model called Acrobat Database

Connectivity (ADBC), which can be used in document-level scripts to connect to a database

for the purposes of inserting new information, updating existing information, and deleting

database entries. ADBC provides a simplified interface to ODBC, which it uses to establish a

connection to a database and access its data, and supports the usage of SQL statements for

data access, update, deletion, and retrieval.

Thus, a necessary requirement to the usage of ADBC is that ODBC must be installed on a

client machine running a Microsoft Windows operating system. In addition, ADBC does not

provide security measures with respect to database access; it is assumed that the database

administrator will establish and maintain the security of all data.

The Acrobat JavaScript

object thus provides methods through which you can obtain

a list of accessible databases and form a connection with one of them. These methods are

provides a number of properties corresponding to all supported SQL and Acrobat

JavaScript data types, which include representations of numeric, character, time, and date

Establishing an ADBC Connection

There are normally two steps required to establish an ADBC connection. First, obtain a list

of accessible databases by invoking the

Then establish the connection by passing the Data Source Name (DSN) of one of the

databases in the list to the

method returns an array of

objects, each of which contains the following properties:

: a string identifying the database

: a description containing specific information about the database

In the following example, a list of all available databases is retrieved, and the DSN of the

is identified and stored in variable

Acrobat JavaScript Scripting Guide