ASP, PDF and FDF

Many websites, intranets and the like use Adobe's PDF (Portable Document Format) technology for a variety of reasons. One of the most common is to provide a PDF Form - similar to a HTML form, but with the benefits that PDF offers - to a user for online completion. In some of these cases, you may wish to populate fields on the form from another datasource, for example populating an order form with the clients current order from a backend database for example. This can be achived using Adobe's FDF (Forms Data Format) language.

To facilitate this kind of interaction Adobe have produced the FDF Toolkit, which is a freeware download from their website with a comprehensive supporting PDF document as well. This toolkit provides interfaces for C++, ActiveX, Java and Perl. However, in some cases you may not have access to the server that the code will be running on, or you may only want a handful of the commands for your specific application. This tutorial provides an example of this situation using ASP (Active Server Pages) to provide the server side component, with some handbuilt FDF statements.

For our example we will use a simple form where we look to provide information on a provided order back to the form and allow the editing of some of these fields. To start with, we need a simple PDF Form to use as our main form.

This tutorial has the following sections :

• Introduction
      This page
• Creating the ASP I
      Creating the simple FDF Handler subroutines in ASP.
• Creating the ASP II
      Creating the rest of the code for our example form.
• Handling Dropdown lists on the PDF form
      Some functions to handle dropdown lists on the form.
• Using Javascript in support
      Using Adobe Forms Javascript to assist the process.
• Conclusion
      A summary and list of supporting resources and references.