PDF Form Filling with FPDM

Package

The FPDM class allows to fill out PDF forms, i.e. populate fields of a PDF file. It is developed by Olivier Plathey, author of the FDPF Library, and has been released as Skript 93.

I created this repository for the following reasons:

• make the current FPDM source available via composer, autoload via classmaps
• bugfixing
  • FIX: compatibility issues with PHP 7.x e376dc1 v2.9.1
  • FIX: filling forms in multiple files (wrong buffer usage, invalid offsets) e376dc1 v2.9.1
  • FIX: convert ASCII object names to utf-8 1eddba7 v2.9.2
• improvements (changes to the original codebase are prefixed with //FIX: change description and ended with //ENDFIX)
  • ADD: support for checkboxes (disabled by default, activate with $pdf->useCheckboxParser = true;) 0375dd9 v2.9.2

Version

Based on version 2.9 (2017-05-11) available from fpdf.org/en/script/script93.php.

Note: If you find that a new version has been hosted on fpdf.org, please do not hesitate to drop me a short note to make sure I do not miss it out.

This repository only contains the separate php class written for form filling (FPDM). If you are looking for a repository containing the main FPDF Library, please head over to github.com/Setasign/FPDF.

Once again, all credits to Olivier Plathey for providing an easy to use script for form filling in addition to his FPDF library!

Installation

Composer

The preferred way of making FPDM available in your app is to install it via composer with

composer require tmw/fpdm

Usage

Composer (autoload)

autoload FPDM class files by adding this to your code:

require 'vendor/autoload.php';

Standalone Script (legacy)

Load the top level entry point by calling

require_once '/abolute/path/to/fpdm.php';

or

require_once './relative/path/to/fpdm.php';

Fields that don't exist

By default, an exception will be thrown if a field doesn't exist. To silently ignore missing fields (which is useful when setting fields en masse), add the following before the $pdf->Load line:

$pdf->set_modes('ignore_missing_fields', true);

Customization to original code

classmaps vs. psr-4 (or: legacy code vs modern frameworks á la Laravel)

Autoloading classes with namespaces and following PSR-4: Autoloader would be desireable. Especially reducing the risk of naming conflicts by using vendor namespaces.

However, FPDM has been around for a long time and as such is used in many projects that use non-namespaced code (I refer to them as legacy projects). Legacy projects instantiate FPDM by calling $mypdf = new FPDM() which is unqualified but defaults to the global namespace with non-namespaced code.

Using psr-4 would autoload the class to a subnamespace (e.g. \codeshell\fpdm\FPDM) instead of the global namespace (e.g. \FPDM) thus breaking any legacy code no matter if it used new FPDM() or new \FPDM().

Classmaps are a compromise. They allow taking advantage of composers autoloading and dependency management. Yet classes are added to the global namespace. Legacy projects can switch to composer without having to refactor their code. Newer projects (e.g. utilizing frameworks like laravel, that heavily rely on namespaces) can still use legacy classes by using the fully qualified name (in this case the class name prefixed with global prefix operator as in new \FPDM()).

That's my reasoning for using classmaps over psr-4 for FPDM. Please let me know if there are use cases where classmaps won't work with modern frameworks.

Checkboxes

I added support for checkboxes. The feature is not heavily tested but works for me. Can be enabled with useCheckboxParser = true like so:

<?php
$fields = array(
    'my_checkbox'    => 'anything that evaluates to true.', // checkbox will be checked;  Careful, that includes ANY non-empty string (even "no" or "unchecked")
    'another_checkbox' => false, // checkbox will be UNchecked; empty string or 0 work as well
);

$pdf = new FPDM('template.pdf');
$pdf->useCheckboxParser = true; // Checkbox parsing is ignored (default FPDM behaviour) unless enabled with this setting
$pdf->Load($fields, true);
$pdf->Merge();
$pdf->Output();

You don't have to figure out the technical names of checkbox states. They are retrieved during the parsing process.

Original Info Page

Everything below is mirrored from http://www.fpdf.org/en/script/script93.php .

Information

Author: Olivier

License: FPDF

Description

This script allows to merge data into a PDF form. Given a template PDF with text fields, it's possible to inject values in two different ways:

• from a PHP array
• from an FDF file

The resulting document is produced by the Output() method, which works the same as for FPDF.

Note: if your template PDF is not compatible with this script, you can process it with PDFtk this way:

pdftk modele.pdf output modele2.pdf

Then try again with modele2.pdf.

Example

This example shows how to merge data from an array:

<?php

/***************************
  Sample using a PHP array
****************************/

$fields = array(
    'name'    => 'My name',
    'address' => 'My address',
    'city'    => 'My city',
    'phone'   => 'My phone number'
);

$pdf = new FPDM('template.pdf');
$pdf->Load($fields, false); // second parameter: false if field values are in ISO-8859-1, true if UTF-8
$pdf->Merge();
$pdf->Output();
?>

View the result here.