PDF Form (Filled) Output

PDF files may contain interactive elements such as text boxes, checkboxes, combo boxes, etc. The PDF Form (Filled) output is used to manipulate such PDF files. This output is designed to work with interactive elements, filling them with data taken from the input.

In this exercise, you must link the input with the output structure by adding rearranges to it and, thus, filling the interactive fields with corresponding object values. In addition, you are proposed to disable the Flatten option to make the interactive fields editable.

Exercise

Download and import the attached configuration called 08. Create PDF Form (Filled) Output in Lasernet Developer 9. Afterward, navigate to the Forms section and open the Sample form.

1. Start by opening a template. To this end, on the toolbar, click Open Template.

2. In the Open Template dialog displayed, select the template, and then click Open.

3. Once you click the Open button in the Open Template dialog box, you are prompted to select whether to embed a file into the form or just to refer to that file. Select the Embed file radio button, and then click OK.

As a result, the template opens in the output on the Template tab.

4. Switch to the XFDF tab in the output.

5. Proceed to add rearranges to the input. To this end, use the Rearrange button available on the Developer toolbar.

6. Once you are done with adding rearranges to the input, drag them to the corresponding value nodes in the output to fill the fields (interactive elements) as needed.

By default, the output is added as flattened, meaning that a document being generated contains fields filled with corresponding object values, but it is locked to change those values. However, you can disable the Flatten option to make interactive fields editable. To this end, follow these steps:

7. Open the Sheet Options dialog on the PDF Form Filler tab, and then clear the Flatten check box. This enables manipulating the form fields.

8. Additionally, you shall change the default value of the Flatten attribute for the form field that you want to unlock for manipulating. To this end, open the node properties for editing and specify false as the default value.

9. Once you are done, you can click the Preview button to preview the final version of your document, which contains fields with filled values.