Chapter 13: Working With Documents, Charts, And Reports; Manipulating Pdf Forms In Coldfusion - Adobe 38043740 - ColdFusion Standard - Mac Development Manual

Chapter 13: Working with Documents,
Charts, and Reports

Manipulating PDF Forms in ColdFusion

You can use Adobe ColdFusion to manipulate PDF forms created in Adobe® Acrobat® Professional and Adobe®
LiveCycle™ Designer.
About PDF forms
Adobe ColdFusion lets you incorporate interactive PDF forms in your application. You can extract data submitted
from the PDF forms, populate form fields from an XML data file or a database, and embed PDF forms in PDF
documents created in ColdFusion.
ColdFusion supports interactive forms created with Adobe Acrobat forms and with LiveCycle. In Adobe Acrobat 6.0
or earlier, you can create interactive Acroforms. Using Adobe LiveCycle Designer, which is provided with Adobe
Acrobat Professional 7.0 and later, you can generate interactive forms.
The type of form is significant because it affects how you manipulate the data in ColdFusion. For example, you cannot
use an XML data file generated from a form created in Acrobat to populate a form created in LiveCycle, or the reverse,
because the XML file formats differ between the two types of forms.
Forms created in Acrobat use the XML Forms Data Format (XFDF) file format. Forms created in LiveCycle use the
XML Forms Architecture (XFA) format introduced in Acrobat and Adobe Reader 6. For examples, see
PDF form with XML data" on page 915. The file format also affects how you prefill fields in a form from a data source,
because you map the data structure as well as the field names. For examples, see
page 916.
The use of JavaScript also differs based on the context. The JavaScript Object Model in a PDF file differs from the
HTML JavaScript Object Model. Consequently, scripts written in HTML JavaScript do not apply to PDF files. Also,
JavaScript differs between forms created in Acrobat and those forms created in LiveCycle: scripts written in one format
do not work with other.
ColdFusion 9 introduced several tags for manipulating PDF forms:
Tag
cfpdfform
cfpdfformparam
cfpdfsubform
The following table describes a few of the tasks that you can perform with PDF forms:
Description
Reads data from a form and writes it to a file or populates a form with data from a data source.
A child tag of the tag or the
cfpdfform
A child tag of the cfpdfform tag; creates the hierarchy of the PDF form so that form fields are filled
properly. The cfpdfsubform tag contains one or more
Last updated 1/20/2012
"Prefilling PDF form
tag; populates individual fields in PDF forms.
cfpdfsubform
cfpdpformparam
914
"Populating a
fields" on
tags.