Adobe Submit button to URL Web Service

Question

Hello,

I am working on a proof of concept to be able to send a PDF to a web service, I am running into a roadblock as to what it is sending and how the Web Service should be receiving the data.

I read conflicting documents as to what Adobe sends. Some say it is SOAP, some say HTTP, some say you need LifeCycle, some say you don't. I have what I think is a valid Web Service(ASP.NET & C#) but after several attempts and variations the button returns an error in Adobe and no actions seem to be performed(I am trying to get it to write the file to the Server). I've done web services in the past, but this is the first one I am doing where the sender is really a "black box" as to what it sends.

I have basically been beating my head against the wall for a couple of days and I am really looking for an example(or even at this point a small snipit) of what the code I need for the C# side of the Web Service to accept the request. Any links to additional sources would be appreciated as well. I think after that I could continue with my actions. At this point I just want to see something get to the service without returning an error, whether it is the PDF, an XML file...anything.

Thank you in Advance

Karl Heinz Kremer · Accepted Answer

You don't use a web service for this, it's just a regular HTML request. And no, FDF is not necessarily the way to go. It is usually more straight forward to submit as HTML and then just deal with what looks like a submission form a normal web form. From that point on, you are no longer dealing with anything that is specific to Adobe Acrobat. Take a look for example at this tutorial: Working with HTML Forms in ASP.NET Web Pages (Razor) Sites | The ASP.NET Site

Only if a "normal" forms submission is not what you are looking for, should you invest time and money into investigating FDF/XFDF or complete PDF submission. I would stay away from FDF and use XFDF instead unless you need specific features of FDF that are not implemented in XFDF (e.g. annotations or JavaScript). XFDF has the advantage that it's a "modern" XML based format and therefore much easier to parse.

To report status back to the PDF form, you always need to use FDF however.

Karl Heinz Kremer · Answer

Let's take a look at the submit options you have:

The same options that you see on the "Submit" dialog are also available via JavaScript.

You can submit a form as FDF, XFDF, HTML and the whole PDF document.

When you select the "HTML" option., you end up with exactly the same submission process that a web form would use, so if you an receive data from a web from, you can receive data from a PDF document. In the case of FDF, XFDF and PDF, the submission is done in a slightly different way. I don't know how to do this in C#, but I can tell you that the data is submitted as raw data in the HTML request. In PHP you would get access to it via "php://input". The following snippet shows you how to take that raw data and save it to a file (in this case, it assumes that the upload is a PDF file, but in case of FDF or XFDF, you can parse the data you get in "php://input"):

<?php
$target_dir = "uploads/";
$target_file = $target_dir . "upload.pdf";
copy("php://input", $target_file); // this is where the magic happens
// report status back to Acrobat/Reader via FDF
$status = "File successfully uploaded.";
header('Content-Type: application/vnd.fdf');
echo("%FDF-1.2\n%âãÏÓ\n1 0 obj\n<<\n/FDF\n\t<<\n\t/Status(");
echo($status);
echo("\t)>>\n>>\nendobj\ntrailer\n<</Root 1 0 R>>\n%%EOF");
?>

This snippet also shows how to report status back to the Acrobat or Reader application. As you can see, there is no error checking here, so that's stuff that you would need to add to make this production quality code.

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