Merging Data and Forms with the PSG PDF API

When I introduced the PSG PDF API during the recent DevPartner Conference in Washington DC I received several questions about whether it was possible to define the layout of something like a standard form using one PDF file, and then simply merge in data in order to create another PDF file. I also received some suggestions about how this might be done, and I am pleased to report that one of those suggestions panned out into a workable solution, at least on the Windows platform.

The solution involves the use of a third-party product named PDFtk Pro. The bad news is that this one isn’t open source and neither is it free. But the good news is it only costs US$ 3.99, which I figured wouldn’t be a problem if you need the functionality that it provides.

Once you have PDFtk Pro installed and in your PATH you can then call the new SetBackgroundFile method on your PdfFile object, specifying the name of the existing PDF file to use as the page background for the pages in the PDF file that you are currently creating. All that actually happens is when you subsequently save your PDF file, by calling one of the Print, Preview or Save methods, the code executes a PDFtk Pro command that merges your PDF file with the background file that you specified earlier. Here’s an example of what the code looks like:

;;Create an instance of the PdfFile class
pdf = new PdfFile()

;;Name the other PDF file that defines page background content
if (!pdf.SetBackgroundFile(“FORMS:DeliveryTicketForm.pdf”,errorMessage)
    throw new Exception(errorMessage)

;;Other code to define the content of the PDF file

;;Show the results
pdf.Preview()

There are several possible benefits of using this approach, not least of which is the potential for a significant reduction in processing overhead when creating complex forms. Another tangible benefit will be the ability to create background forms and other documents using any Windows application that can create print output; Microsoft Word or Excel for example. Remember that in Windows 10 Microsoft has included the “Print to PDF” option, so now any Windows application that can create print output can be used to create PDF background documents.

I have re-worked the existing Delivery Ticket example that is distributed with the PDF API so that it first creates a “form” in one PDF file, then creates a second PDF file containing an actual delivery ticket with data, using the form created earlier as a page background.

I have just checked the code changes into the GitHub repository so this new feature is available for use right away, and I am looking forward to receiving any feedback that you may have. I will of course continue to research possible ways of doing this on the other platforms (Unix, Linux and OpenVMS) but for now at least we have a solution for the Windows platform that most of us are using.