Fill in a PDF form from VBA (MS-Access)

Question

I want to fill a PDF form from my MS-Access 2003 .mdb project. The PDF has been created with Adobe LifeCycle Designer ES 8.2, all fields have significant names. However, the users who will run the PDf-filling functionnality don't have LifeCycle installed but only Adobe Reader 9.5 instead (might migrate to Adobe Reader X soon, I would like my code to be a little bit future proof).

How can I implement this? Most threads that I've seen on the Web redirect to the official Adobe SDK documentation, which is completely a mess when you're only doing VBA.

Thank you.

Answer 1

Finally managed to get something working after merging some lines of code. Here it is. It works with the Adobe Acrobat 9.0 Type Library set as reference in my VBA project.

Dim FileNm, gApp, avDoc, pdDoc, jso

FileNm = "c:\form.pdf" 'File location
Set gApp = CreateObject("AcroExch.app")

Set avDoc = CreateObject("AcroExch.AVDoc")
If avDoc.Open(FileNm, "") Then
    Set pdDoc = avDoc.GetPDDoc()
    Set jso = pdDoc.GetJSObject

    jso.getField("topmostSubform[0].Page1[0].fieldName[0]").value = "myValue"
    pdDoc.Save PDSaveIncremental, FileNm 'Save changes to the PDF document
    pdDoc.Close
End If

'Close the PDF; the True parameter prevents the Save As dialog from showing
avDoc.Close (True) 

'Some cleaning
Set gApp = Nothing
Set avDoc = Nothing
Set pdDoc = Nothing
Set jso = Nothing

Note that topmostSubform[0].Page1[0] is the default name that Adobe LiveCycle Designer gives to your main PDF document, while fieldName[0] is the name of your field. If you have multiple fields with the same name, Adobe LiveCycle Designer automatically adds index numbers so you can easily loop through your fields.