Using pdfbox to get form field values

Question

I'm using pdfbox for the first time. Now I'm reading something on the website Pdf

Summarizing I have a pdf like this:

only that my file has many and many different component(textField,RadionButton,CheckBox). For this pdf I have to read these values : Mauro,Rossi,MyCompany. For now I wrote the following code:

PDDocument pdDoc = PDDocument.loadNonSeq( myFile, null );
PDDocumentCatalog pdCatalog = pdDoc.getDocumentCatalog();
PDAcroForm pdAcroForm = pdCatalog.getAcroForm();

for(PDField pdField : pdAcroForm.getFields()){
    System.out.println(pdField.getValue())
}

Is this a correct way to read the value inside the form component? Any suggestion about this? Where can I learn other things on pdfbox?

Answer 1

The code you have should work. If you are actually looking to do something with the values, you'll likely need to use some other methods. For example, you can get specific fields using pdAcroForm.getField(<fieldName>):

PDField firstNameField = pdAcroForm.getField("firstName");
PDField lastNameField = pdAcroForm.getField("lastName");

Note that PDField is just a base class. You can cast things to sub classes to get more interesting information from them. For example:

PDCheckbox fullTimeSalary = (PDCheckbox) pdAcroForm.getField("fullTimeSalary");
if(fullTimeSalary.isChecked()) {
    log.debug("The person earns a full-time salary");
} else {
    log.debug("The person does not earn a full-time salary");
}

As you suggest, you'll find more information at the apache pdfbox website.