Interactive Report Forms

[olu_guy]

Hi all,

 

I have designed forms (for filing e.g. application forms) with jasper reports and iReport in various formats PDFs and Excel and they all work fine. The forms will have to be printed for it to be filled in.

 

Now there is a slight change in requirements, the forms when exported must be interactive (i.e. they can be fillied in electronically), the WORD version comes out fine and can be filled (though not through normal interactive form fields but it provides text drawings that can be edited) but the PDF version comes uneditable.

 

I want to be able to produce these forms in interactive format, is this possible using jasper reports ? is there a way to specify the textFields in jasperreports to come out in some fashion when exported ?

 

Any ideas will be highly appreciated.

 

Cheers

 

Olu.

[Teodor Danciu]

Hi,

 

I guess PDF files are also editable, but you need a special editor such as Acrobat Professional (not only Acrobat Reader).

PDF documents could also contain forms with editable text fields, but we don't support them in JasperReports.

A custom-made PDF exporter derived from our built-in one could be created though.

You could try it.

 

I hope this helps.

Teodor

[purplehaze]

Hi Teodor,

 

I need add some interactive text fields to PDF I generate.

Could you point me which PDF exporter class - method I have to override

to allow this functionality.

 

I promise I will contribute my code in case it looks usable.

 

Regards

Roman

[Deficiency]

Hi!

Do you have a solution for this? I would need this too!

 

Thx

Florian

Post Edited by Deficiency at 04/23/2009 09:36

[Teodor Danciu]

Hi,

 

It is about the JRPdfExporter class, which controls our document export process. But hold on for a moment. We recently enhanced this PDF exporter class so that it can leverage "exporter handlers". This means that you won't have to modify the exporter, but rather implement some "pdf export handlers" in order to determine the PDF exporter to do something you want.

You would write such handlers in order to create editable text fields in the generated PDF.

We plan to do this ourselves in the near future. We want to achieve this using generic elements in the JRXML report template.

Basically, you'd have the chance to put special markers in the JRXML report template (generic elements) in all those places where you want editable fields to appear in PDF. These generic elements or markers will be handled during PDF export by the "pdf export handlers" that we need to write.

 

To put it in short, we would need to achieve for PDF something similar to what we did in the /demo/samples/genericelement sample that we provided with the project. There, we've done it for HTML.

 

The PDF exporters enhancements I mentioned will be shipped with JR 3.5.1 in one or two weeks from now. But if you want to look ahead and try it, take the latest source from SVN.

 

I hope this helps.

Teodor

 

[jgarn23]

Is this capability available yet? Does is permit fillable fields in the generated PDF?

"Basically, you'd have the chance to put special markers in the JRXML report template (generic elements) in all those places where you want editable fields to appear in PDF. "

Thanks.

[o66183]

 Can somebody please reply to the last question here. At least a simple 'no' would help to save time.

Thx 

Oliver

 

[lucianc]

There's no functionality built into JasperReports to do that.  I don't know whether anyone impemented it externally (as custom or generic elements).

Regards,

Lucian

[mrboo]

Any updates on this topic??? I need add editable fields in a pdf report. 

 

Thanks!!!

[mgingins]

Hi,

As it been implemented yet?

If not as someone experimented alternative ways to do it?

I am looking for a solution to add interactive checkboxes in a PDF report.

Best regards,

Michaël

[elisa.peressi]

Hello. Any news about this functionality? As it been implemented?

Regards,

Elisa