Edit PDF online and save and form data to server

Question

Hello,

I have some PDF documents which are being displayed in the browser, with some fields already being pre-populated from the database using iTextSharp (we are running Windows Server 2008, IIS 7, SQL Server 2008, and ASP.NET 2.0/2.5 with C#). Our clients need to be able to fill in the remaining fields and save the PDF to the server.

I have considered the following possibilities:

1.) Somehow using iTextSharp to parse the form fields, grab all the form data and save it to the database on submit.

2.) Adding a submit button to the PDF itself using LiveCycle with some sort of JS click event to save the FDF/XFDF/XDP/XML data either to the database or to a flat file on the server.

I am currently unsure as to what the best approach would be, what would work, or how to implement any of these possible solutions, so any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Do you have access to use the Livecycle itself to save the data?

You could setup a service process in LiveCycle to accept the changes in the data from the pdf (which is in XDP/XML), and save that to the database with a sql activity. This would be your best bet. This is what LiveCycle is used for, PDf form submission and rendering, mung other things.

If you want more details on ho LC works, I'd be more than happy to give you reference stuff.a

Answer 2

Thanks again for the replies. I am working on this project for work, and we're researching the Livecycle solution. I will let you know on Monday how it's going.

Answer 3

Going pretty good so far - we've managed to submit PDF form data back to the server, convert the FDF to XML and save to the database. The LiveCycle dynamic PDFs however do not seem to work the same way. When we are submitting the PDF back to the server, we're getting a 500 Internal Server Error. So the process works so far, but only on our static (non-LiveCycle) PDFs.

Any Idea why we might be getting the internal server error on the LiveCycle forms?

Answer 4

or do it online 24x7 from your PC at www.ConvertToWord.com upload convert online & edit

Answer 5

Check out FDFToolkit.net:

FDFToolkit.net uses iTextSharp technologies, but, simplifies the FDF,XDP,XML parsing and merging into simplified methods.

Besides parsing and merging, FDFToolkit.net can also directly populate a ADO.net datarow with PDF field values submitted to a ASP.net script. FDFToolkit.net can extract, merge, and populate both Acrobat and LiveCycle PDFs.

If you need programming help, FDFToolkit.net includes 1 year of free technical support and online updates.

for more info: http://www.fdftoolkit.net/