PDFLib Coldfusion example

Forum|Forum|18 years ago
October 23, 2007
2 replies
1932 views

Developers,

I realize that iText has been widely discussed here and Coldfusion MX 8 now includes the <cfpdf> tag to merge and alter pdfs, but my company still uses CFMX 7 and PDFLib and am hoping for some assistance in altering pdflib code to work with coldfusion.

Below is the example pdf merge file provided by PDFLib. It is written in java, much like the iText example was, and then coded for Coldfusion by PaulH here. Thanks in advance for any and all help.

Code:

Advanced techniques

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L

LumpiaAuthor

Inspiring

Thanks for the post Grizzly. Unfortunately, my company acquired PDFLib and wants us to use this. Originally, I tested iText and we were about to go forth with it, but they wanted the company as a whole to use one product for similiar tasks, instead of many products doing the same thing. Anyone else have ideas on how to recode the attached java code for Coldfusion?

C

cf_dev2

Inspiring

Lumpia,

You're probably going to have do it through a little trial and error. But it looks like there are only a few patterns you have to translate to CF, and they're repeated throughout the code.

For example the string array:
String pdffiles[] = ...

Probably translates to a CF array (ignoring 0/1 based index issues)
<cfset pdffiles = listToArray("PDFlib-real-world.pdf,PDFlib-datasheet.pdf,....")>

The call to
p = new pdflib();

Should translate to a createObject() call
<cfset p = createObject("java", "com.pdflib.pdflib").init() />

Once you've created the object, the methods from CF are almost exactly the same. Though you might need to use javacast() in a few places.

java:
p.set_info("Creator", "PDFlib Cookbook");
p.set_info("Title", title + " $Revision: 1.8 $");

cf:
<cfset p.set_info("Creator", "PDFlib Cookbook") >
<cfset p.set_info("Title", title + " $Revision: 1.8 $")>

The rest looks pretty standard. Try/catch becomes <cftry><cfcatch>. If becomes <cfif>. The for loop becomes <cfloop>. etc.

Keep in mind you can also use <cfscript> syntax. Though I didn't use it here, its probably closer to the java code in terms of syntax.

HTH

G

Grizzly9279

Participating Frequently

Not sure if this helps at all, but we merge and fill PDFs with CFMX 7 using pdftk, read more about it here:
http://www.accesspdf.com/pdftk/

It's basically a stand-alone executable that you can call with <cfexecute>.

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