Adobe Acrobat is not displaying field values when document contains XFA

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
January 2, 2025
2 replies
1397 views

Adobe Acrobat does not display field values when the document contains XFA. The field values of the attached document are successfully shown in Firefox and Chrome.

broken.pdf

Correct answer MikelKlink

You have a PDF with a hybrid form definition, it contains both an AcroForm form definition and a XFA form definition. This is meant to allow XFA aware viewers to display a form based on the (more flexible) XFA definition while XFA non-aware viewers can still display the (native PDF) AcroForm form.

In your case the third party library appears to have filled in the AcroForm field but not the XFA field. As a consequence XFA aware viewers will not show the values but others will.

Bernd Alheit

Community Expert

Use the original W-9 form and fill it with Adobe Acrobat or Acrobat Reader.

M

Mian Property Dealer

Participant

Yes

Bernd Alheit

Community Expert

How have you filled the form?

M

mvelikovAuthor

Participant

Using a third-party library - Telerik`s RadPdfProcessing library. I just examined the document and it seems it is following the PDF specification in the part of the writing of the Interactive form dictionary and especially the "Fields" collection.

2 0 obj
<< /DR << /Font << /F7 6 0 R /F8 7 0 R >> >> /Fields [ 8 0 R 9 0 R 10 0 R 11 0 R 12 0 R 13 0 R 14 0 R 15 0 R 16 0 R 17 0 R 18 0 R 19 0 R 20 0 R 21 0 R 22 0 R 23 0 R 24 0 R 25 0 R 26 0 R 27 0 R 28 0 R 29 0 R 30 0 R ] /XFA [ (preamble) 31 0 R (config) 32 0 R (template) 33 0 R (datasets) 34 0 R (localeSet) 35 0 R (xmpmeta) 36 0 R (form) 37 0 R (postamble) 38 0 R ] >>
endobj

If I remove the XMA part, the fields' values can be seen in Acrobat. It seems the issue comes from the combination of XFA and AcroForms, but I cannot find what ruins it.

On the other hand, if I make field changes using Adobe Acrobat the document seems to be displayed correctly. I am attaching the document I updated with Adobe Acrobat.

My goal is to understand where the issue comes from and why it is not reproducing in browsers but only in Adobe Acrobat.

fw9_Adobe.pdf

MikelKlinkCorrect answer

Participating Frequently

You have a PDF with a hybrid form definition, it contains both an AcroForm form definition and a XFA form definition. This is meant to allow XFA aware viewers to display a form based on the (more flexible) XFA definition while XFA non-aware viewers can still display the (native PDF) AcroForm form.

In your case the third party library appears to have filled in the AcroForm field but not the XFA field. As a consequence XFA aware viewers will not show the values but others will.

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