You've taken a code sample from chapter 8 of my book "iText in Action." The result of that code sample is consistent with what I wrote on page 273:
Running Listing 8.18 with this form as resource will give you the following result:
AcroForm
If your question is Any idea what I am doing wrong? then the answer is simple: you stopped reading on page 270, or you used a code sample without reading the accompanying documentation. How to fix this? Read the documentation!
If your question is Why don't I get any info about the fields? (which isn't your question, but let's assume it is), the answer is: you're using code to retrieve AcroForm fields, but your form doesn't contain any such fields. Your form is a pure XFA form, which means that all field information is stored as XML and XML only!
Suppose that you now want to know: How can I extract that XML? then you should go to the place where you found the example you copy/pasted.
That could be here:
http://itextpdf.com/examples/iia.php?id=164
Or maybe here: http://sourceforge.net/p/itextsharp/code/HEAD/tree/trunk/book/iTextExamplesWeb/iTextExamplesWeb/iTextInAction2Ed/Chapter08/XfaMovie.cs
Or even here: http://kuujinbo.info/iTextInAction2Ed/index.aspx?ch=Chapter08&ex=XfaMovie
This code snippet will return the complete XFA stream:
public string ReadXfa(PdfReader reader) {
XfaForm xfa = new XfaForm(reader);
XmlDocument doc = xfa.DomDocument;
reader.Close();
if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(doc.DocumentElement.NamespaceURI)) {
doc.DocumentElement.SetAttribute("xmlns", "");
XmlDocument new_doc = new XmlDocument();
new_doc.LoadXml(doc.OuterXml);
doc = new_doc;
}
var sb = new StringBuilder(4000);
var Xsettings = new XmlWriterSettings() {Indent = true};
using (var writer = XmlWriter.Create(sb, Xsettings)) {
doc.WriteTo(writer);
}
return sb.ToString();
}
Now look for the <xfa:datasets>
tag; it will have a subtag <xfa:data>
(probably empty if the form is empty) and a subtag <dd:dataDescription>
. Inside the dataDescription
tag, you'll find something that resembles XSD. That's what you need to know what the fields in the form are about.
I could go on guessing questions, such as: How do I fill out such a form? By using the method fillXfaForm()
; How can I flatten such a form? By using XFA Worker (which is a closed source library written on top of iTextSharp), but let's keep those questions for another thread ;-)