Fill PDF Plugin

Question

Hey everyone, I need to use the Fill PDF plugin in my Appian project. I have to create PDF documents where users of my application can add items, such as their name. I've built an interface that includes a 'paragraphField' containing the text of my PDF. I've used this interface as a form for my Fill PDF plugin. Can anyone help me better understand how the Fill PDF plugin works? I couldn't find any documentation.

Mike Schmitt · Answer

Fill PDF is great! It replaces the clunky "fill out a thousand individual fields with expression code" from the older "PDF from Template" plug-in, with a simpler setup into which you can pass an expression (for sanity's sake, you MUST use an expression rule) - but after this, IIRC, all it needs to do is return a list of key:value pairs, where the key names are "name" and "value". The "name" values must be the PDF field (internal) names, as you'd get by running the "getPdfFields()" rule on the PDF's document ID, and the "value" values would be simply the text you want filled. This gets passed into the "PdfField" configuration of the node. 
 The documentation included with the plug-in download is a little sparse but it at least clarifies on the "PdfField" data type structure. 
 And here's a working example of one of the expression rules we have in our system that populates a (200-field(!)) PDF. One of the major advantages of this setup of course is the ability to copy/paste code to handle entries that are massively repeated but differ by only an index number or similar (good for filling grids/lists/etc).