Q: I need to export the user's data programmatically from a PDF form
to a database (or a file). Can I use PDFNet for this purpose and can
you point me to any code snippets in C#? Thanks.
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A: You can use PDFNet SDK (http://www.pdftron.com/net) to extract any
content from PDF pages.
In case you only need to extract forms data (i.e. AcroForms data) you
may want to take a look at InteractiveForms sample project (http://
www.pdftron.com/net/samplecode.html#InteractiveForms). Another
approach to the same problem is to export/import forms data via FDF
(e.g. as illustrated in FDF sample http://www.pdftron.com/net/samplecode.html#FDF).
In case you are dealing with static PDF forms without any intelligence
you could use content extraction API such as TextExtractor and/or
ElementReader to analyze PDF page content and extract data based on
position information or more complex heuristics.
As a starting point you may want to take a look at ElementReader and
ElementReaderAdv sample projects:
ElementReader: http://www.pdftron.com/net/samplecode.html#ElementReader
ElementReaderAdv: http://www.pdftron.com/net/samplecode.html#ElementReaderAdv
TextExtract : http://www.pdftron.com/net/samplecode.html#TextExtract
PDFNet SDK sample code is available for various languages: C#, JAVA,
VB.NET, and C/C++.