Form cannot be edited after going through pdffiller

[Taakn]

Hello,

Once I fill out my pdf form with pdffiller (and everything works great), the form becomes a read-only pdf document. My understanding after testing is because you include by default the flatten option in your command "pdftk " + sourceFile + " fill_form " + tempFDF + " output " + destinationFile + " flatten".

Would it be possible to include flatten as an optional input parameter in the fillForm function?

Thanks so much

[whitef0x0]

I'll look into it

[Taakn]

@whitef0x0 thanks it's a separate issue but could you change the callback in fillForm so that it returns the standard function(error, return)? That way we can use wrapAsync to use the synchronous version of the function ?

The function would look something like that (0 for failure, 1 for success):

fillForm: function(sourceFile, destinationFile, fieldValues, flatten, callback) {

    //Generate the data from the field values.
    var tempFDF = "data" + (new Date().getTime()) + ".fdf",
        formData = fdf.generator(fieldValues, tempFDF);

    child_process.exec("pdftk " + sourceFile + " fill_form " + tempFDF + " output " + destinationFile + (flatten ? " flatten" : ""), function(error, stdout, stderr) {

        if (error) {
            //console.log('exec error: ' + error);
            return callback(error, 0);
        }
        //Delete the temporary fdf file.
        fs.unlink(tempFDF, function(err) {

           if (err) {
                return callback(err, 0);
            }
            // console.log( 'Sucessfully deleted temp file ' + tempFDF );
            return callback(undefined, 1);
        });
    });
}
};

And to use the synchronous version we can have:

pdfFiller.fillFormSync = Meteor.wrapAsync(pdfFiller.fillForm.bind(pdfFiller));

var ret = 0;
try {
  ret = pdfFiller.fillFormSync(sourcePDF, destinationPDF, data);
} catch (e) {

}

if (ret == 0) {
  // Failed do whatever
} else {
  // success do whatever
}

[kevitan]

I've put in a pull request #34 to make flatten parameter to pass into fillForm()

[whitef0x0]

@johntayl this should be closed