We have clients reporting an issue that causes an inconsistant behaviour and user experience opening PDF files that contains LiveCycle XFA forms.

Our users receive PDF generated files from government containing those XFA forms with filled data. If user open that PDF file on Adobe Reader, Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome or any other PDF reader other than Adobe Acrobat Pro, they see filled data regarding "person A". If they open the same file on Adobe Acrobat Pro, as Acrobat Pro can identify that LiveCycle XFA form, it shows different filled data "person B".

As you expect, this causes different user experiences and misinformation as our customers (which are lawyers) need to process that data and they have different experiences.

As a workaround we thought of having both adobe reader and adobe acrobat pro installed but since Adobe doesn't provide that option anymore we couldn't provide that workaround.

Another workaround would be to have by default opening PDF files with Microsoft Edge and then when the user needs, they "open as" the file they want to get Adobe Acrobat Pro functionalities, which is also not ideal.

Please note users with Adobe Reader won't suffer this issue of XFA forms since Adobe Reader doesn't provide advanced features (XFA dynamic form processing).

Our suggestion would be to provide an user interface option like having those XFA forms disabled by default and showing a warning if user want's to have that feature enabled so the user could have that feature enabled. This behaviour would work very similar like Microsoft does with macros on the documents (by default they come disabled and if you want, you need to allow it to work).

This way you keep the functionality present and let the user sets the behaviour they want and you guarantee that user only need Adobe Acrobat Pro by default.

Alternatively to our suggestion would be to allow to have both Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat Pro installed. This scenario would work but isn't also the ideal solution.

I think having a control switch would be the perfect option as you won't require to have two pieces of software doing the same thing.