Solutions - Integration - eMerge

eMerge - Dynamically Pre-filling PDF eForms

Many of the TeleForm based form capture systems we have implemented offer eForm completion via PDF versions of the paper forms. By using a dedicated eForm solution such as Process Director or LiquidOffice, it is very simple to pre-fill forms for the end users but often the cost or overhead of such a solution is unjustified. For these cases we have created eMerge to allow simple and flexible pre-filling of TeleForm PDF forms within your web site.

eMerge is an ASP.NET web application that utilises the Adobe PDF Toolkit (included with eMerge) to auto-populate field data into PDF eForms using data from a URL string. The PDF is then returned back to the client as a pre-filled PDF form, ready for them to print or complete on screen for electronic submission.

Once installed on your web server, you can simply call the PDF form via a URL adding the pre-fill data in the following format:

http://{server name}/eMerge.aspx?pdf=test.pdf&Forename=Sally&Surname=Smith

• Everything after the question mark is a parameter (delimited by the “&” symbol).
• The format of each parameter is [field name]=[field value].
• The PDF parameter is always required, however the order it appears in the list of parameters is not important.

Example of use:

The following example uses the sample Demo.pdf form provided with eMerge. This form has been created with TeleForm and exported as a PDF with the PDF+Forms product.

Fields in TeleForm are usually converted to PDF with a prefix on the fieldnames. For example, the First_Name field in TeleForm has been renamed in the PDF as b12c96nfFirst_Name. The full PDF fieldnames must be used in the URL string, so to populate the b12c96nfFirst_Name and b12c96nfSurname fields with “Joe” and “Bloggs” in the Demo.pdf, use the following URL:

http://www.epc.co.uk/eMerge/eMerge.aspx?b12c96nfFirst_Name=Joe&b12c96nfSurname=Bloggs&pdf=Demo.pdf

Tip: To pass carriage-returns to multi-line fields, use the URL-safe code “%0D”.