Itext Pdf Template Create Template

Part III - Wrap up. Using what we learned to create a PDF invoice from an XML fileThis is the third part of the article series describing PDF creation using iTextSharp.

In the first and second part we looked at how to create a PDF, how to assign meta information and how we write some text into the documents. We also looked a bit at how to place text using exact positioning using the content byte and some simple image and graphics handling.Let's end this series with a small example creating a simple invoice from an xml file using all of the knowledge gathered from these three parts. You'll be surprised at how easy it is! Just keep the focus on how you place stuff on the document, that's the tricky part!Okay, there are thousands of ways to present an invoice. I've chosen to do a head, row and total kind of layout. So, there will be a table holding the header information with the addresses and order references, a rows table with items, prices and quantity's and a grand total table holding the totals, the fees and the VAT information. There is also a table with the payee information, such as office details, contact information and such.

I guess it is a kind of classic invoice layout.We need some data for the example, so I've created a data class reading an xml file with four tables: invoiceheader, invoicerows, invoicetotal and invoicepayeeinfoI've wrapped it in a separate class to make it is easy to create overloaded methods supplying the data from other sources than the xml file, for example a database. The class has a file path parameter in its constructor pointing to the file you want to use. The class exposes four methods.

You need to control the page breaks yourself when writing text using the content byte, but it is a simple straight forward process so, don't worry. The easiest way of doing it is assigning a local variable and set it to the last writable position on the page ( NOTE: The page coordinates goes from the bottom to the top) and then check the current writing position against that variable, deciding if we need to do a page break or not. Let's look at how we do it while looping thru the invoice lines in the example solution.

Editable Pdf Template

I am looking at the feasibility of creating something using C# and iTextSharp that can take a PDF template and replace various place holder values with actual values retrieved from a database. Essentially a PDF mail merge. I have the iText in action book but it covers rather a lot of stuff i don't need and I am struggling to find anything related to what i want to do.

Itext Pdf Template Create Template Pdf

I am happy to use PDF fields as the place holders so long as the merged/flattened form does not look like it has fields in it, the output document should look like a mail merged letter and not a form that has been filled in. In an ideal world i just want search the text content of the PDF and then replace text place holders with their correct field values a la word mail merge.Can anyone advise me of the best approach to this and point me in the direction of the most helpful iTextSharp classes to use, or if you know the iText in Action book a pointer to the most helpful section for me to read. The template and output should both be PDF, if that's what you mean. To give better context what we have at the moment uses word document templates, we use these templates to parse out placeholder values that map to database fields and do a mail merge type operation to produce letters. We want to avoid the complexity of converting a word document template to PDF when word does this very well. So we want to be able to do PDF template to PDF document and ideally all the our customer should have to do to create the PDF template is save their existing word template as PDF.–Jun 8 '11 at 12:45.