Amyuni Technologies Blog: News and Resources from the PDF Experts

PDF form or AcroForms allow users to interactively edit specific portions of a PDF document in supporting viewer applications. A PDF form is composed by one or more AcroForm fields that provide a name-value association once they have been edited.

Amyuni PDF for Silverlight is an online PDF viewer based on Amyuni PDF Creator as a server side component and a Silverlight viewer that runs within a browser. Amyuni PDF Creator takes care of converting a PDF file into an equivalent XAML-based package, and sends it to the Silverlight client. A full description of Amyuni PDF for Silverlight can be found in this page: http://www.amyuni.com/en/developer/pdfsilverlight.

Reviewing our goals, we want to be able to:

1. Show form fields as editable components in Silverlight
2. Submit the values of those fields to the server (so that we can store them in a database for example)
3. Put the values back in the PDF file.
4. Send back the filled-out PDF to the client either as an editable form or as a flattened PDF.

Showing each form field as an editable component in Silverlight

When a PDF file containing form fields is converted into a XAML package by Amyuni PDF Creator, each text field will be converted into a TextBox XAML tag. This tag will be loaded as the corresponding editable component in Silverlight.

Example 1:

<TextBox Canvas.Left = "233.60" Canvas.Top = "242.69" Width = "215.27" Height = "37.13" FontSize="15.91" BorderThickness="0" Background="{x:Null}" Name="acField1">

<TextBox.Foreground>

<SolidColorBrush Color = "#000000" Opacity="1.00"/>

</TextBox.Foreground>

</TextBox>

Let’s first review the internal architecture of our Silverlight viewer sample, we have a library with a Silverlight control called PDFSilverlightControl where our XAML based packages are loaded from a URL provided, and we have a Silverlight sample application that is hosting this control.

In our PDFSilverlightControl sample class we have the property:

Example 2:

/// <summary>

/// Returns editable text fields from the PDF file.

/// </summary>

public List<TextBox> FormFields { get;}

This property can be used to retrieve the form fields in the Silverlight application.

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