PDFOne .NET
Powerful all-in-one PDF library for .NET

Compatibility

VS 2005/2008/2010/2012/2013

Home » Newsletter » June 2007

By M. V. Niranjan

One of our customers had a PDF document with several pages, each containing a set of form fields. While most of the form fields contained values that were different across pages, there were a few form fields that needed to have the same value on all pages. Our customer just wanted to fill a field on one page and have the change reflected on all the other pages.

For example, imagine a PDF document with a form in each page. There is field where date is entered. If the document has say 100 of page, users may not want to enter the same date in all the 100 pages!

How It Works

Our solution involved adding several form fields with same FieldName. An important requirement for this solution to work is to set the ApplyFormAppearances* property of the PDFDocument object to true.

Code Snippet

PDFDocument doc = new PDFDocument();

// Create a text field
PDFFormTextField txt = new PDFFormTextField();
txt.FieldName = "TextField";
txt.FieldValue = "Type here";
txt.Rectangle = new RectangleF(6, 0.27f, 2, 0.5f);
txt.BorderWidth = 2;
txt.BorderColor = Color.LightBlue;
txt.BackgroundColor = Color.White;

// Creates several text fields all with 
// the same name and adds them to different 
// pages
for (int i = 0; i < 8; i++)
{
  // Creates a new PDF page
  PDFPage page = new PDFPage();

  // Clones text field and adds it to the page
  page.AddFormField((PDFFormField)txt.Clone());

  // Adds the page to the document
  doc.AddPage(page);
}

doc.OpenAfterCreate = true;

// Specifies that viewer should provide an appearance 
// style for the fields
doc.ApplyFormAppearances = true;
// Saves changes to output PDF file
doc.Save("Forms.pdf");
doc.Close();

* - ApplyFormAppearances determines whether viewer application or the PDF document provides a visual appearance style for the form field. For form fields that do not have any content and whose content will not be known until the user enters some text, the viewer application will have to provide the visual appearance style for the fields, as the PDF document cannot provide a static visual appearance style in such cases.

---oO0Oo---

Downloads

• Sample PDF document with fill-one, update-many PDF form fields
• Complete source code Visual Studio 2003 C# solution