Developer Notes

This page contains information for developers wishing to update or maintain the pdf endpoint on the dbconnector service.

Developer Setup

Also see SQLProxy setup notes

Testing

Also see SQLProxy testing notes

Deploying

Also see SQLProxy deployment notes

Knowledgebase/Tips

Graphical tool for PDFToolKit (used by fillable PDF processes in Drupal / dbconnector)

The PDF Chain tool for Ubuntu has a nice interface which utilizes the features of the PDF Toolkit which is used by the DBConnector. This is particularly useful for extracting fdf data files from fillable forms, which can then be manually edited and fed back into the form for in-dev-testing.

Changing the PDF version of a document.

The non-fillable PDF generator has a maximum PDF version of 1.5. Many PDF generators, including fillable PDF forms save in version 1.6.

Version 1.6 works fine for the fillable PDF processes but using a v1.6 PDF docs cause the non-fillable PDF process to fail for the PDF generator.

To downgrade a PDF from v1.6 to v1.5, use the following gostscript command on Ubuntu:

gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.5 -dPDFSETTINGS=/screen -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -sOutputFile=<output.pdf> <input.pdf>

You can determine the version using this command:

pdfinfo <input.pdf>