PDFsharp - moved to http://forum.pdfsharp.net/

acwilkins · Joined: 03 Nov 2006 Posts: 1

My first crack at fields filling didnt go so well...

Our forms are made from acrobat 7.0 with an xsd schema set as a datasource.

I could see behind the scenes where the field values were in fact being set, however, the data would not display once the resultant form was opened in adobe reader or acrobat. This, I discovered, was due to the fact that there is an embedded xfa dataset in the pdf. Which was where all the form data came from.

So... after a bit of messing around I noticed I could get the stream from dictionary object that contained the xml data extract what was found there. I could then change, insert, delete, etc... and write the data back into the pdf... Thus successfully filling in the form fields.

I guess my question is... do the PDF gurus present have any comments as to this practice being good or bad?

Other comments: I've spent quite a bit of time these last few weeks with the acrobat sdk (WHICH IMO SUCKS), and a pile of other 3rd party libraries... I must say PDFSharp is very impressive! Awesome work guys!!

Stefan Lange · Joined: 12 Oct 2006 Posts: 47 Location: Cologne, Germany

>>I guess my question is... do the PDF gurus present have any comments as to this practice being good or bad?

I’m not very familiar with these new forms, but I think it is good because it works. The older so called AcroForms are very difficult to handle and this is why Adobe introduced the embedded data set.

Regards
Stefan Lange

BPead · Posted: Fri Dec 08, 2006 8:49 pm Post subject: Re: XFA Datasets - AcroForms

acwilkins, would you be willing to post the code you wrote to extract/update the XFA info from a PDF?

Regards,
Brian Pead