Description Aurélien Seurein 2014-08-25 04:40:20 EDT

Created attachment 246301 [details]
Example of an editable field

In a project that I'm working on, I needed to include editable fields
in the template files using the tool BIRT. So, I modified the BIRT
runtime source (4.3.1) in order to create editable fields when we use
the style 'linethrough' in the templates files. 
I modified the classes PDFRender.java and PDFPage.java at the location
org.eclipse.birt.report.engine.emiter.pdf.

By default, BIRT is unable to generate editable fields for reports in
PDF format, ie fields whose content can be edited directly on the
final report. A patch has been necessary to make this feature
available.
In this patch, the emitter for generating PDF reports
"org.eclipse.birt.report.engine.emiter.pdf" was patched by changing
only two classes: PDFRender.java and PDFPage.java. These have been
amended to insert the following two features.
To insert an editable field in a BIRT model, we have to use the "line
through" style on an selected element, this style is located next to
the "underline", "italic" and "bold" styles in BIRT. In the PDF emitter, I use iText API to create the editable field. For example, if the model has an element of type text with the value "Suzuki", in the generation that will produce an editable field with predefined value "Suzuki".

Source code available here : https://wiki.eclipse.org/File:AddEditableFields.zip