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Topic: Re: PDF Forms: Problem with inserting duplicate pages
Conf: (P-PDF) Developers, Msg: 57993
From: LeonardR
Date: 5/29/2002 05:29 PM

At 12:09 AM 11/21/2001 +1100, p-pdf-developer Listmanager wrote:
>I am using repeated calls to PDDocInsertPages() to insert multiple copies
>of the same page(s) into an existing document. My problem is that the
>pages being inserted contain form fields, and that these form fields have
>identical identifier names to those in the destination document.

Yup, that's a BIG problem...


>The first solution would be to programmatically pre-process the file that
>I wish to insert before doing the insert itself: I would open up the
>document and rename each field identifier, making sure that there are no
>name clashes with those in the destination document.


These are already filled in fields that you are merging? Will you
ever need to extract the data out (eg. export as FDF?), or just print
and/or archive?

>I have stalled on this approach as I can not find a way of
>programmatically changing form field identifiers. There is a
>AFPDFieldGetName() function, so one would assume that there would be a
>matching set function?

You may/will probably have to use the low level CosObj calls to
change the actual dictionary entries on the form field annotation objects.


>The second approach and one which I am not sure is catered for, and that
>is to assume that the field identifiers will be renamed automatically for
>me if I name the identifiers appropriately at form design time.

Bad assumption! PDDocInsertPages() doesn't do anything fancy -
it just copies all the relevant data...


>I've read about "named destinations" and also "Templates" in the
>documentation and wondered if any of these two areas would be relevant to
>my investigations.

Named destinations won't help. Templates are for server-side
processing, mostly. They MIGHT be usable here, not sure of your exact issue.


Leonard