I've created a form in InDesign that I use in my daily work -- it has several fields that hold information about issues I'm currently working on. This information comes from a proprietary in-house system that I have access to via JDBC, SQL, language bindings, etc. I would like to take my InDesign document, create a PDF form with it, and then have new PDFs automatically generated with the data provided by our own database. I can handle 90% of this, but the Adobe end of it is confusing and (frankly) a bit frustrating.
I can make a static PDF from InDesign just fine, but how can I create a PDF that is meant to be populated at a later time using external data? I can put it any format - XML, CSV, whatever you want. I just don't want to have to launch InDesign every time I want to print a new form. Launching Acrobat would be fine, if not optimal -- at least in Acrobat I don't have to be careful not to mess up the source document.
I would love it if Adobe provided a way (outside of LifeCycle - I don't have the money for that) to automate this entirely within CreativeCloud, but I am more than competent with outside programming environments if that's going to be required.
Can anyone give me some direction with this?