Flag for stop exit

Unfortunately this is not possible from within a form and just JavaScript. You can however create a document level JavaScript that will be called just before the document closes. This will be called regardless of how the document got closed (e.g. user closes the document, Reader is closed). It will not work if the Reader gets killed with the task manager.

You could for example put up a message box that says: Do you want to submit the data? <Yes> <No>

This still will not help if your user has filled the form only partially, but unfortunately there is no way to cancel the closing of the document from within JavaScript. Is the document submitted to a server? If so, you may want to implement the submission of partially filled out forms, and give the user the ability to recall such a form to finish it.

Otherwise, whacking the user a few times may be the simpler solution :-)

There is no submission, it is just a form w/ a lot of fields. But i would be willing to consider submitting it to a server if you could explain the procedure, of doing this and the retrieval process.

If you don't have the forms submission infrastructure already in place, I'm not sure that you should add it just because your users have problems with the workflow.
What I don't like about Reader is that it warns you that you cannot save the form when you start to edit it (if you have not disabled this warning already), but it does not tell you that it's closing a document that you modified. Even though you cannot save the document, it would be nice if it would give the the chance to cancel closing a document. This at least would give you an indication that the document was modified.

How much work are you willing to put into this? If you really, really, really want to put up a web server just to store partially edited forms, I can give you some pointers about how to do that. Do you have any experience with web servers and/or with web scripting languages? Do you have a Web server available that you could use to play with? If so, is it Windows or Unix/Linux/Mac?

The general idea is to submit a FDF file to the server, which contains the current status of your form. You can then save this FDF file on the server, and when you user wants to continue, serve this FDF file back to the user. A FDF file can automatically open a PDF file when you store it's location in the FDF data. You may want to do this when the user submits the file.

With some more processing, you can even merge the form and the forms data on the server and serve a plain PDF file (non-interactive) back to the user for archiving purposes.

In house we have 2 servers 1 linux box and another which is  a win 2000 server which is used just for saving word and other windows related docs. We also have a web server that is off site and is maintained by an outside vendor that is located next door. That machine is a linux box as well. If you can give me a start of how to do the following i'll give it a try.

The general idea is to submit a FDF file to the server, which contains the current status of your form. You can then save this FDF file on the server, and when you user wants to continue, serve this FDF file back to the user. A FDF file can automatically open a PDF file when you store it's location in the FDF data. You may want to do this when the user submits the file.

With some more processing, you can even merge the form and the forms data on the server and serve a plain PDF file (non-interactive) back to the user for archiving purposes.

I added some code to the "Did close" and a button on the form that does an import fdf file. The did close routine exports the form as a file with a name given by the user. This works fine in full acrobat, but not in reader...is this feature not available in reader? I have javascript enabled !

This feature is not available in Reader. Do you have the Acrobat JavaScript Reference? It has information about which software supports which methods.

Reader only supports the submission to a web server of FDF data. All other mechanisms (e.g. writing to a file or emailing the FDF file) are only supported by the full version of Acrobat.

Do you know if one of your servers supports PHP? This is the only environment that I have code for to process the submission of a FDF file.

yes it does support php!