[PDFBOX-4066] Merging documents with nested fields duplicates child fields

• Type: Bug
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Affects Version/s: 2.0.8
• Fix Version/s: 2.0.9, 3.0.0 PDFBox
• Component/s: AcroForm, Utilities
• Assignee: Maruan Sahyoun
• Reporter: Al Phaba
• Created: 16/Jan/18 12:30
• Updated: 24/Mar/18 09:41
• Resolved: 02/Feb/18 17:16

Description

I have a pdf with a lot of acroforms, I do some manipulation on it which results in a new pdf. So I have PDF-1 (which is the original one )and PDF-2 (just a duplication of PDF-1), now I want to merge them. Both PDFs have some acroforms for example: field_a, field_2...

Before I merge them I flatten PDF-1, because I only want to have acrofields from PDF-2. When I check then my new merged PDF I can see that there are no visible fields on on the pages from PDF-1 and there are fields on pages of fields of PDF-2. At the first look it seems ok, but when I inspect the fields I can see that the merger has renamed all the fields for PDF-2 e.g. field_a_dummy123, field_b_dummy232 ...

It seems to me, that flattening does not remove the fields and thats why the PDFMerger from PDFBox will rename the fields for PDF-2 because acrofields need to be unique.Another guess was that there is a bug in mergeAcroForm()

 

@Test
public void flattenAndMerge() throws IOException {
    File testForm = new File(classLoader.getResource("./TestForm.pdf").getFile());

    byte[] testFormAsByte = Files.readAllBytes(testForm.toPath());
    byte[] testFormAsByte2 = Files.readAllBytes(testForm.toPath());

    PDDocument pdf1 = PDDocument.load(testFormAsByte);
    PDAcroForm acroform = pdf1.getDocumentCatalog().getAcroForm();
    acroform.flatten();
    Path flattendedPdf = Files.createTempFile("flatten", ".pdf");
    pdf1.save(flattendedPdf.toFile());


    PDFMergerUtility merger = new PDFMergerUtility();
    merger.addSource(new ByteArrayInputStream(Files.readAllBytes(flattendedPdf)));
    merger.addSource(new ByteArrayInputStream(testFormAsByte2));
    merger.setDestinationFileName("./build/flattenAndMerge.pdf");
    merger.mergeDocuments(MemoryUsageSetting.setupMainMemoryOnly());

}

Here is my SO Article

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/48271924/pdfbox-flatten-pdf-does-not-remove-acroform-elements?noredirect=1#comment83544858_48271924

 

 

Issue Links

• links to: PdfBox flatten pdf does not remove acroform elements