Export XML for Import to complete PDF Form

[lampcov]

Hi everyone, I'm new to filemaker and have been doing fairly well to this point. I have a question relating to exporting a record into a specific XML format.

I have a database with customer/product records. I would like to be able to export these as XML so that I can import them into Acrobat Pro 10 to "fill in" a form. I know I can export XML from FM10 but I am unsure how to specific the field names, etc to make the file properly formatted for the form.

I'm not overly familiar with XSL Sheets but think it would come into play here. If there as an easier way to pump this data into Acrobat I'm open to suggestions.

Thanks for your help and patience.

Marc

[TheTominator]

There used to be (and maybe still is) an example of using XML to generate an FDF file.

This is a Adobe's PDF companion file to hold values to fill into a PDF form. The FDF file holds the name of the PDF file along with the values it is to fill in. The idea is that the user would open the FDF file and Acrobat would automatically load in the corresponding PDF document and fill in the form values.

Edit:

I was not able to locate a URL for the FileMaker -->XML-->FDF example that was on the FileMaker website for FMP version 6, but I did check my previous download which had the author's name.

He posted more recently on the forums for Google Docs and gave an example of a simple FDF file.

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google%20Docs/thread?tid=7e9cf8ff4e70c75b&hl=en

Here is the original download that is no longer available from or is hard to locate on FileMaker.com. (It is for FMP 6 so it would need to be converted to 7. It uses the same XML grammer though.)

FMPtoPDF_Folder.zip

Edited March 19, 2010 by Guest
Followup info

[lance123]

Hi Marc,

The way I went was to export an xfdf file that is basically adobes xml format. I skipped the whole style sheet thing and compiled the xfdf file by reproducing what I saw in an adobe form export. Once I had what looked right in a field then I exported the field contents. The only gotcha I ran into was that the line endings are not acceptable from what FM creates. So I used Troi file plugin to modify those.

Hope this helps,

Lance

[ciarliera]

Is there any way to clean up the line endings without using a plug-in?

I have the correct format for an fdf file calculating in a field in FM but the problem is when I export field contents from FileMaker and save with an fdf extension Adobe does not recognize it. I know I have the right format because if I simply copy & paste the field contents into BBEdit and then save as fdf I can open the file in Adobe.

[ciarliera]

Also, if I export the field contents to a text.fdf file and then copy and paste the contents onto an fdf file created by Adobe Acrobat 9 pro, I can then open up the doc and see the data from FileMaker as part of the form.

[TheTominator]

Export via XML + Stylesheet will handle the line ending issue and the encoding issue (i.e. UTF16 encoding used by Export Field Contents).

It may be tricky the first time to get the hang of making a stylesheet, but it is worth getting this into your toolset.

[ciarliera]

I decided to use the XML setup provided by TheTominator. THANK YOU!!! I've got it working for a few fields!!! I am about to set up the other 100 now -)

I changed it a bit so that I could store the necessary files in container fields and then export them to the Temporary folder (this wasn't possible in 6). I also changed the XSL so that it did not need to use the Web at all, it simply opens the Sample fdf file through Acrobat 9.

Thanks again. Really appreciate it!!!