The primary purpose of a FormDefinition object is to support form identification and field-level processing of a form. As a result, the core parts of a FormDefinition object are the TemplateImages property, which contains the template image, and the Fields property, which contains a collection of Field objects. One or more FormDefinition objects are the central part of a FormSet object.

A secondary purpose is to hold data that is stored persistently in a form definition file. That includes a name of the form, parameters for form processing and some miscellaneous data. For more information about the content of a form definition file, see the overview section for form definition files.

The FormDefinition class is an abstract class which defers the details of reading and writing form definition files to a derived class, FormDefinitionFile. You can create your own derived classes to manage reading and writing to other locations, such as a web server or database.

This class also has a few features intended for your convenience when developing a form setup or form processing application. The Tag property provides a place to store one object or value. Typically, you would store a reference to a user interface element, such as a TreeNode, or your own object with additional form data in this property.

The HasChanged property indicates whether any persistent part of a FormDefinition has changed since the last time you read it from or wrote it to a form set file. This is a very easy way to determine if you need to prompt a user to save any changes. Whenever you change a property that would affect a form definition file, HasChanged will automatically change to true. This includes changes to contained Field objects. If you change a property that does not affect a form definition file (such as the Tag property), HasChanged will not change. Whenever you write a FormDefinition to a form definition file, or read a FormDefinition from a form definition file, the HasChanged property will change to false.

The GetPartialHashCode method returns a hash code of much of the data that goes into a form definition file. Specifically, everything that could affect form identification or field processing is part of the hash code.

Note: This class implements the IDisposable interface and you should always call the Dispose method when you have finished using it.

System.Object
   Accusoft.FormDirectorSdk.FormDefinition
      Accusoft.FormDirectorSdk.FormDefinitionFile

Reference

FormDefinition Members
Accusoft.FormDirectorSdk Namespace
FormDefinitionFile Class