PDF Rendering and Form Fields

In my application, I use the QuickPDF library to fill in the fields on government forms.  Unfortunately, when I tried RenderPageToStream to copy the form to an image and view the filled in form, the fields are not included.  So I tried using this code to flatten the fields and check the results:

  for iField := 1 to FQP.FormFieldCount do begin
    iSuccess := FQP.FlattenFormField(iField);
  end;
  FQP.SaveToFile('C:\Documents and Settings\Jack\Desktop\Test Output 2.pdf');
  FQP.RenderPageToStream(iDPI, iPage, iOptions, FMS);

Only some of the fields get flattened and those that do get flattened are the ones that show up.  I suspect that some of the fields might be "child" fields but I never got my head around why people use those or how to deal with them.

So, I have two questions.  First is whether it might be possible for the library to support form fields in the rendering functions and second is failing the first, do you have any ideas how I might get all the fields to flatten so they will show up in my viewer.

Any help is very much appreciated.

Jack


Edited by Jack - 14 Jul 09 at 5:56PM

Hi Jack!

It would be helpful to see your pdf form but ...
It's possible to set form field properties like "not printable" or "not visible"...
Perhaps this is the answer to your questions?

   ffc := QP.FormFieldCount;
   if ( ffc < 1 ) Then
      Exit;

// . . .

   for i := 1 to ffc do
   begin

//    . . .

      ffname := QP.GetFormFieldTitle(i);
      ffprt  := IntToStr(QP.GetFormFieldPrintable(i));
      ffvis  := IntToStr(QP.GetFormFieldVisible(i));

//    . . .


Cheers, Ingo

Ingo,
I followed up on your suggestion.  I continued to get only partial flattening of the fields and I could see no difference between the fields that got flattened and those that did not.  Then, it dawned on me that there WAS a pattern to the way the fields were getting flattened and that was that every other field got flattened.  So, when a field gets flattened, it is no longer a field and the fields above that field move down one and if you increment your pointer, you will skip every other field. 

I changed my loop to a downto loop and the problem was solved.

Thanks for your help.

Hi!

So it's the best to get the FormFieldCount first in a separate variable and then doing the flattenloop with these variable...

@Jack: It looks like you can be a help for others here very soon ;-)

Cheers, Ingo