PDF has some blank values and 1 blank page

[Paul Brigden]

Hi community,

We have an issue where the PDF that is being generated from a form has a blank page between 2 properly rendered pages, and some fields (textboxes and a dropdown) are blank.

I noticed that if I explicitly type in the fields they are rendered properly with values. However when the values are being populated in the from Services/Actions (some SQL queries) they end up blank in the PDF.

When I look at the Orbeon.log file after submitting the form I see the XML values of the form are showing up in the log. So there must be something wrong with the PDF generation missing certain values.

Has anyone encountered this issue before?

Thanks,

Paul

[Oscar]

Hi Paul, 

The value for the field that you are utilizing to query the database has to be an initial value. If this value is set to a calculated value, then the PDF will not include the text in the created PDF. 

As far as the blank pages, I cannot tell you why this is happening. If you have hidden sections they might be taking up the space. 

Regards, 

Oscar

[Alessandro Vernet]

Hi Paul,

The blank page and the uninitialized fields might be 2 separate problems.

- For the blank page, would you be able to create a minimal form that
reproduces the problem, and share it with us?
- For the uninitialized fields, when is the action that runs the service
running? Could you maybe include a screenshot of that action?

‑Alex

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[Alessandro Vernet]

Hi Paul, did you get a chance to further investigate this issue with PDF
generation? If so, have you found a solution, and if not, do you have any
feedback about the questions in my previous message?

[Oscar]

Alessandro, 

We were able to resolve these issues.

For the uninitialized fields, the main field that the actions were relying on was automatically populated by another process. However, we found that when setting up the property it had to be done in the initial value. If it was put inside of the calculated value, we saw the error happening that the fields were not being passed through the PDF generation or sending them forward. As to why this is, I still do not know why, but we got it working. 

The blank page in the PDF, was a cause of the property Insert Page Break being selected in one of the headers. Once this was removed, the blank page was removed. 

Regards, 

Oscar

[Alessandro Vernet]

Hi Oscar,

I'm glad you guys found a solution, even if there still is a mystery as to
why things work with the initial value and not the calculated value; and
thank you for the update.