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Merge dynamic PDFs into one

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Former Community Member

Hi.

I am aware that similar questions have been asked in the past but I am not able to find any definite answer. And, I may have a slightly different (easier) requirement, so I thought of raising this question again.

I have a Dynamic XFA form created using LiveCycle Designer.  I have used XSD binding and at runtime, in Java,  using some third party utility I fill in the XML data adhering to the XSD in this Dynamic form. So the result is a filled PDF document (pretty much static) which looks like any other read only PDF document. But, as at the core it is a XFA document, I am not able to concatenate it with other such resulting PDF document. No third party library is able to handle it and the reason may be the fact that they are internally dealing with XML rather than a standard PDF.

So to be specific : I need to find some Java based solution as I do not have a way to do it using LiveCycle or any Desktop based tool. And I need to concatenate two Dynamic XFA documents which have been filled out and saved as x.pdf and y.pdf on a disk. They look and feel like any standard PDF documents.

What are my options? Does Adobe have any Java APIs for this purpose? I am looking for some cost effective solution though as we can not afford to buy a full enterprise suite for this purpose.

Any help or pointers are much appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

3 Replies

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Former Community Member

If this is something you commonly do with the same two PDFs, you could merge the two XDPs with each section in a subForm. Hide the one that does not have data. Put all the elements of both schemas into one, maybe under sub elements under the root. To merge two of them, you would merge the underlying data and render the form with the merged XML.

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Former Community Member

It is not the same two PDFs. I might need to merge 3 or 4 PDF documents together (and each time these documents are different generated dynamically by our server based on several business criteria) after the data has been filled in.

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Former Community Member

I don't hink you will be able to merge them as form based PDFs. Most if not all third party libraries for PDFs don't handle them. Maybe install Acrobat Pro on a server, set it up somehow to print to PDF to use that the 'flatten' the form into a non-interactive one that third party tools can deal with. We own the LiveCycle a server products that can flatten them so it is just theory on my part.