Question

Fill Out PDF Form workflow activity - checkboxes...

Workflow Forms

Updated October 26, 2016

asked on October 25, 2016

I am working with a client that has a Forms form that is filled by a user and submitted.

Upon submission a workflow kicks off to populate a fill-able PDF and store it in the repository.

Seems simple enough and most of it is working fine, however, there are issues with the checkboxes.

As you can see, it fills out the ‘names’ fields just fine, and even the checkboxes are filled out, but not exactly how I was expecting them to be. If the Forms form has the checkbox selected, I want the PDF form to have it selected as well, but with an ‘X’ instead of a ‘T’. The same goes for the other option, if it’s not filled out then the PDF checkbox should be left blank and not have the ‘F’ there.

The workflow runs without error, it grabs the information, the entry is created, the PDF is attached to the created entry, the PDF fields are populated, it is then renamed, and lastly it is stored – all good except the checkboxes.

What could I be missing? A setting somewhere? All we are trying to achieve is an ‘X’ on selected checkboxes, and blank for checkboxes not selected. Any help is greatly appreciated, thank you.

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Replies

replied on October 25, 2016

By default when you check a checkbox on pdf does it show F / t or X? Also can you please share with us your pdf fill variable window?

I remember doing something similar with no issues.

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replied on October 25, 2016

Please refer to the images I posted below to Miruna, thank you very much.

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replied on October 25, 2016

Could you add screenshots of what your Fill Out PDF Form activity's properties look like? It looks like maybe your PDF checkboxes are expecting values other than true/false or checked/unchecked.

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replied on October 25, 2016

Ok, hopefully this is what you are looking for:

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replied on October 25, 2016

That's pretty much it. I was also hoping for one of the checkbox fields with the drop-down open to see what the options in the Value column are because I was sort heading in the same direction as Andrew's post below. The PDF standard allows fields of one type to render as a completely different type.

Workflow does a best guess at mapping checkbox values as "checked"/"unchecked", but there's no guarantee we got them all because the standard is very permissive. For ex, one of the common setups we ran into was a checkbox that mapped to 3 values behind the scenes.

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replied on October 26, 2016

Well here is the checkbox on the form with options visible. Forms automatically gave them their values since I didn't.

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replied on October 26, 2016

Sorry, I should've been clearer. I meant in the PDF activity:

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replied on October 26, 2016

Okay, here it is. I have another process that uses the PDF activity and with that one I was able to make a selection from a drop down, whereas with this process I can only grab the variable. I am guessing it has to do with how the PDF checkboxes were made then by the client...?

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replied on October 26, 2016

Oh, so there is no drop-down with "checked"/"unchecked" for that field? That definitely points to the checkboxes not being proper checkbox fields in the PDF. You might want to open a support case and attach the file so we can take a closer look.

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replied on October 25, 2016

I had a similar issue. When I created my pdf form it created all the check boxes as text fields instead of checkbox type. The actual text of the variable was then entered into the form. If it is a radio or text box type it will use the Adobe Pi font ( which is just X's ) http://fontsgeek.com/fonts/Adobe-Pi-Std-Regular

Check your pdf form in Adobe and if all your checkboxes are of the text field type delete them and recreate them as checkboxes.

If you check the properties on one of your checkboxes you should see something similar to this:

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replied on October 25, 2016

Okay, I will check that out and let you know what the results are. Thank you for your advice.

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Fill Out PDF Form workflow activity - checkboxes...

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