Fill PDF on Windows with PDFTK

Dunno why, but now, after restarting my machine it returns values :)

now the next problem is the "fill_form output flatten" is throwing an exception

Unhandled Java Exception:
java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: gnu.gcj.convert.Input_UTF8 not found in [file:.\
, file:C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jre6\lib\ext\QTJava.zip, file:.\, core:/]
   at 0x005a3abe (Unknown Source)
   at 0x005a3fb2 (Unknown Source)
   at 0x006119f4 (Unknown Source)
   at 0x00649ee4 (Unknown Source)
   at 0x005b4c44 (Unknown Source)
   at 0x005470a9 (Unknown Source)
   at 0x00549c52 (Unknown Source)
   at 0x0059d348 (Unknown Source)
   at 0x007323c9 (Unknown Source)
   at 0x0054715a (Unknown Source)
   at 0x00562349 (Unknown Source)

Any ideas ...?

Hi there ... thx for the reply.

Well the problem is still around, and after 2 hours of googling for the solution i gave up and came up with my own solution for it.

the first command "dump_data_fields" worked as said after restarting the machine ... must be some caching error. But the generation wasnt able because of that pdftk Exception. So the error is on the tk side, not Fill PDF.

What i did is, I wrote my own little c# console app using iTextSharp, which has truly glorious xfdf support.
this file takes the template, xfdf and outputfile names as parameters and creates the flattend pdf. That way I have even more control, like lets say signing the PDF etc.

If anybody has interest on that solution here a short tutorial.

1. Create a new visual studio console app
2. include itextsharp dll
3. write down following code

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;
using iTextSharp.text.pdf;
using System.IO;

namespace flatPDF
{
    class Program
    {
        // args:
        // 0 => template
        // 1 => xfdf
        // 2 => outputfile
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            if (args == null || args.Length != 3)
                return;

            CreatePDF(args[0], args[1], args[2]);
        }

        public static void CreatePDF(string templ, string xfdf, string output)
        {
            PdfReader template = new PdfReader(templ);
            MemoryStream mem = new MemoryStream();
            XfdfReader xfdfReader = new XfdfReader(xfdf);
            //PdfStamper stamper = new PdfStamper(template, mem);
            PdfStamper stamper = new PdfStamper(template, new FileStream(output, FileMode.Create));

            stamper.AcroFields.SetFields(xfdfReader);
            stamper.FreeTextFlattening = true;
            stamper.FormFlattening = true;
            stamper.Writer.CloseStream = false;
            stamper.Close();
            mem.Close();
        }
    }
}

and compile it.
4. fillpdf.module line 306 or something like that instead of $data = shell_exec ......
write down

define("FILESPATH", "c:\\PATH_TO_YOUR_DRUPAL_FOLDER");
$outputstring = substr($fillpdf_info->url, 0, -4) . $user->uid . date("s") . ".pdf";
      exec(escapeshellarg("C:\\PATHTOAPP\\flatPDF.exe") .
	   " " .
	   escapeshellarg(FILESPATH . str_replace("/", "\\", $fillpdf_info->url)) .
	   " " .
	   escapeshellarg(FILESPATH . str_replace("/", "\\", $xfdffile)) .
	   " " .
	   escapeshellarg(FILESPATH . str_replace("/", "\\", $outputstring)));

5. few lines later after the watchdog lines, replace the rest with

$handle = fopen($outputstring, "r");
    $values = fread($handle, filesize($outputstring));
    fclose($handle);
    unlink($outputstring); // Delete the file directly after reading it
    header('Content-type:application/pdf');
    header('Content-disposition:attachment; filename="'.$download_name.'"');
    echo $values; 

that should do it ... sry I've no idea how to create patches for drupal etc., thats the reason why i do it the ugly way here :)

Hope that helps ... if any further info needed just write, or if you need the already compiled exe itself.

For any c# haters out there, that little app up there can be easily written with Java and using iText. I personally will be going with that custom app solution, because as already said I can automaticly sign the PDF on flattening, do some ACLs or anything else.

Anyway thx for your engagement wiz, the pure pdftk solution would help to make Fill PDF work nice out of the box.