Hi Craig,

I am not sure what your long term goal is on this one. Are you planning on

#1: having the users use that pdf form for data entry and then capture the data back to VFP tables?

#2: Or is this a one-time deal where you have 1 single pdf form and you want to capture the data from the formfields already stored on that pdf form one time to a VFP table?

If #2, open the pdf in Acrobat 6.0 Professional, click on Advanced, Forms, Export Forms Data. Choose the .xml file type option and name it test.xml

Lets say I have four forms fields on my pdf form:

AGENCY -empty
ADDR1 -contains 'Address Line 1'
ADDR2 -contains 'Address Line 2'
CITYSTZIP - contains 'City, State, Zip'
NAME - Contains 'Fist, Last'

When I export the data as type xml using Acrobat 6.0 Professional to the file test.xml and then afterwards from within vfp issue the command:

=XMLTOCURSOR(STRCONV("test.xml",11),"xmlcur", 512)
BROWSE

I now have the cursor 'xmlcur' populated with the below fields:

Addr1
Addr2
CityStZip
Name

with the same values that were in each formfields listed above.

*************************
However, if your goal was the first option #1 above, then you will be better off looking at 3rd party tools (like Gnostice's pdftoolkit activex or iSedQuickPDF) that have properties that can step through a pdf form's fields and allow you to grab the values in each formfield and then do whatever you want with the data. You can also print the pdf form with or without the form field data on it using the toolkit.

We are looking at this right now. The fastest way is to use a vfp form with the same form fields on it to capture the data and then use that data to create an xfdf file to populate the form fields on the pdf with. Then, when you open the pdf form by pointing to the xfdf file instead (you can use windows api from within vfp for this to use Adobe Reader for instance) of the blank pdf form, the pdf form will be opened with the data from the xfdf file.

Another option is to use any of the 3rd party tools mentioned above (there are many to choose from search the web). If you store your data in tables using vfp forms, use the 3rd party tool to take the data from your tables and programmatically populate the pdf form's formfields with it.


Just some ideas.