PDF Tools

Hi Druva Kota,

This plugin is not getting deployed to our cloud environment [Appian Version 20.3].

Deployment Error:

2020-12-21 10:56:26,280 [ajp-nio-0.0.0.0-8009-exec-4469] ERROR com.atlassian.plugin.manager.DefaultPluginManager - There was an error loading the descriptor 'Fill PDF' of plugin 'pdftools'. Disabling. com.atlassian.plugin.PluginException: com.appiancorp.suiteapi.common.exceptions.AppianRuntimeException: com.appiancorp.process.admin.IncompatibleSmartServiceRegistrationException: The Smart Service Module was invalid: Illegal attempt to change the data type for smart service pdftools.FillPDFPauseOnError, input or output named PdfFields (APNX-1-4104-005)

Michael Chirlin - thanks, any chance Appian might come up with a remedy for this issue on the plug-in side?

FYI i didn't see your reply initially since Community apparently doesn't want to notify me for basic replies here.

Hi Mike, 

Can you please tell me how do I configure fill PDF tool pluggin ? I need to create an editable form. Users will fill that pdf form with required values and submit. After submitting , we  can download that newly edited  pdf. 

We recently upgraded to 20.3 and this plugin was dropped from our environments. A suitable alternative for our use-case was the smart service named PDF Doc From Template. (Use a PDF template to populate data into and save as a PDF file in Appian)

This error will show up when there is a versioning issue with the plugin cdt.  If you look in your tomcat-stdout logs you'll see the actual issue.

Support will point you to https://community.appian.com/.../kb-1097-illegal-attempt-to-change-the-data-type-for-smart-service-x-x-x-input-or-output-named-name-error-thrown-during-plugin-deployment

We are using the PDFBox library to insert the fields into the PDF. 

You may be running into this issue:

stackoverflow.com/.../form-field-values-set-with-pdfbox-not-visible-in-adobe-reader

This plugin is using the PDFBox java library: https://pdfbox.apache.org/docs/2.0.7/javadocs/org/apache/pdfbox/text/PDFTextStripper.html

If you are seeing issues, they will be present in that library and not fixable directly in the plug-in.

Was your question on how to modify this plug-in so that you can redeploy it on your environment?

Do you mean for Create PDF Smart Service? Here's an example configuration that produces the following image. You will need to adapt the rules to use the equivalent data types (e.g. rule!PdfText to type!PdfText)

Example PDF.txt

Hi Druva Kota

Thus plug-in no longer deploys in one of our internal CS Cloud environments. Support have diagnosed this as an issue with a deprecated function to change the data type of a CDT. In this environment there is already a PdFField CDT with a different namespace:

PdfField (http://types.appiancorp.com/ps). Deleting this CDT before deploying the plug-in does not seem to make any difference - the CDT is re- created with the same namespace during the failed deployment.

Deployment error:

2020-10-07 02:25:00,850 [localhost-startStop-1] ERROR com.appiancorp.plugins.LoggingPluginEventListener - Failed to enable Plug-in 'PDF Tools' (pdftools) version 2.2.9: 'There was a problem loading the module descriptor: Fill PDF.<br/>com.appiancorp.suiteapi.common.exceptions.AppianRuntimeException: com.appiancorp.process.admin.IncompatibleSmartServiceRegistrationException: The Smart Service Module was invalid: Illegal attempt to change the data type for smart service pdftools.FillPDFPauseOnError, input or output named PdfFields (APNX-1-4104-005)' 

Support recommendation:

In terms of next steps, I recommend following the steps outlined in the following KB to update the CDT version that the plug-in is referencing in the code: community.appian.com/.../kb-1097-illegal-attempt-to-change-the-data-type-for-smart-service-x-x-x-input-or-output-named-name-error-thrown-during-plugin-deployment