Has your company invested the time, money and resources to create electronic forms, only to have users continue to hand in paper copies because they can’t submit electronically? Do you want to generate dynamic PDF reports from database data rather than printing reams and reams of paper copies? If so, you’re not alone. Hundreds of companies are frustrated by the same issues but can’t justify purchasing thousands of dollars in software to complete their electronic document solutions. The activePDF product line is designed to help streamline these processes and assist you in getting your organization on the right track toward the paperless office. Licensed per server, activePDF Toolkit enables you to extend PDF form-filling capabilities to your entire organization, without paying per-user costs. As the example below illustrates, you can also dynamically populate PDF templates with data from any source, effectively turning your server into a robust report-writing engine.

How-to

In this example, a PDF template is automatically populated with data from a database. Adobe® Acrobat® is used to create a PDF template containing form fields, which will control layout of the data in the outputted PDF. Each form field name corresponds to a database column, and a “row number” variable is appended, enabling Toolkit to walk through the database records and progressively populate the fields appropriately. A connection string and SQL statement are passed to the example to establish the database connection and retrieve the appropriate records. Finally, Toolkit populates the PDF template with the entire record set while additional template pages are automatically generated, depending on the number of records retrieved.

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