This is a cool one! James Ward, the RIA Cowboy, explains in his blog, how to put a Flex app inside a PDF.

Here is how to do it:

- Create the back-end data source for the application
- Create the basic Flex front-end application
- Create a back-end PDF generation service
- Create a PDF with form fields that will be used to store the data
- Modify the Flex application to read data from the PDF
- Add a way for the user to generate a PDF from the Flex application
- Merge the final Flex application into the PDF template

To learn more, you might wish to download Adobe’s LiveCycle Data Services. Note, that a single CPU version of LiveCycle Data Services is free - even free in production environments. If you haven’t checked this out, go ahead! LiveCycle Data Services is great way to make your Flex apps really interactive!

Note for users with Mac systems: Download the Linux version of LiveCycle Data Services and run the installer. When the installer asks wether to do a full install inclusive Tomcat etc. or a WAR install, choose the WAR install. Put lcds.war - the LiveCycle Data Services Server - and the lcds-samples.war in the webapps folder. Additionally, put sampledb in there too.

Then restart your app-server - in my case Jetty - to get the stuff deployed.