(First off, thank you for the very useful API, book and forum).
I've been charged with providing a proof-of-concept as soon as I can for
servlets to perform the following tasks using XFA forms. I'm pushing hard for
us to use iText, so I've read every message and FAQ posted in the past year
that mention XFA. I think I've designed it correctly, but since this touches
on some tricky forms issues (reader-enabling, etc), could someone reply if you
they see a flawed assumption about iText functionality? My servlets will:
1. Open a static XFA Form created in AcrobatPro 8.1 (i.e. with LiveCycle
Designer) with reader-saving rights enabled, that has no data yet (call it a
'template' if you'd like).
2. Populate this template's Form fields with data values (making no direct
changes to the pdf itself); save it as a new pdf, and download this
editable/savable/filled-in pdf to the user (user will then edit and save
offline in Reader).
3. In a second servlet, upload this user-updated XFA form, and read in the
new Form field values.
As I understand it, creating a filled-in form in this way will not break the
reader-enabled saving in the new pdf, since all I'm doing is setting Form field
values and saving a pre-filled copy like "questions.forms.FillEnabledForm" does
(side note: I remain in agreement with the EULA regarding reader-enabling since
I have less than 500 users).
Second, since this is a static XFA form, I can use the normal AcroForms APIs in
IText: I don't ever have to read or write to the XFA structure itself, and the
iText code for this purpose will be exactly the same (opening template, setting
form data, saving editable copy, reading in updated form).
Last, even though we would ideally like some XFA Form fields to be of type
"richText" (to allow users to do things like bold, underline, etc), it is not
possible to simply set the value of such a Form field with XHTML content via
iText (I would need to directly modify the pdf outside of the form fields,
which would break the reader-enabling). I can however use '\n' and '\t' to
insert line breaks and tabs in a plain text field (and I could even create
bulleted lists with creative use of '\n', '\t' and dashes/numbers if I wanted
to).
Thanks for any feedback! The docs are great; the only thing I couldn't
determine is if it would be less of a headache to just create an acroForm in
AcrobatPro 8.1 (which uses LiveCycle Designer) instead of XFA. I don't even
know if this is possible; but if the iText code is exactly the same for the
above-stated purposes, then I'm assuming it doesn't matter anyway.
Regards,
-Peter Demling
M.I.T. Lincoln Laboratory
Lexington, MA
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