Merging Non XFA and XFA

[Abhishek Kolluru]

Hi Group,

Need your advice and suggestions on an approach for my use case.

I have an prefilled form ( XFA) which is an output of forms service and also has reader extensions applied to it. I have a requirement to pull a PDF from a third party system, this PDF is designed in Indesign and append it to the prefilled PDF. As you may know, since prefilled PDF is an XFA form, it doesn’t work with assembler service.

Right now, we are recreating those PDF from the third party as fragments and using them at the design phase. This is becoming a cumbersome process. I am trying to look for ways we can automate this, I cannot flatten the original form since only part of the data is being prefilled and rest of it is expected to be filled by user.

Is there a way I can create a fragment dynamically based on the content of the Indesign PDF, if I am able to extract content of it somehow ? Or may be other better ways to approach this. Please suggest.

Thanks,

Abhishek 

[fred.pantalone]

Have you found a solution to this yet? One solution that comes to mind, but is admittedly ugly, is to convert the static content to images and then insert them into image fields in the XFA form. There are different ways to approach this. The first step would be to get the image data as small as possible (compressed without compromising printability - if that's important). You can convert these images into base64 encoded data, insert it into the XML data, and merge with your XFA form template. Do you know what I mean? 

Good luck and feel free to respond with further questions about this approach.

Fred

[Abhishek Kolluru]

Thanks, Fred. When I posted this question I tried merging through Acrobat as I wan under impression the backend assembler packages were same between Acrobat and LiveCycle. Later I used the assembler service, wrote a regular merge ddx where source docs were my XFA and non XFA, as long as I keep my base doc as an XFA, the merge worked just fine. This actually solves my use case. 

However, in continuation I needed to append an QR code only on the last page of this merged PDF around the footer area but I cannot append a new footer since the form already has one, I tried various ways to write my DDX but none worked. Any thoughts how I could approach this ?

Thanks,

Abhishek

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[fred.pantalone]

Sorry for the delay, Abhishek. Can you get the QR code as an image and then place it in the proper location on the non-XFA PDF before assembling?

[Abhishek Kolluru]

Probably that was also an option to explore, Fred. We ended up using graphic source tag from assembler and converting the QR code into a PDF with required width*height. This seemed to have solved our purpose. I was thinking if there was a more direct way to print an image on a non XFA PDF with Assembler service, doesn’t seem to me it has one. 

Thanks,

Abhishek

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[fred.pantalone]

I'm glad you figured it out. I had assumed that you could drop images onto pages with Assembler but that doesn't seem to be the case.