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:

Answer 1

The field can be a top-level field. So you need to loop until it is no longer a top-level field, then you can get the value. Code snippet below loops through all the fields and outputs the field names and values.

{
    //from your original code
    PDDocument pdDoc = PDDocument.loadNonSeq( myFile, null );
    PDDocumentCatalog pdCatalog = pdDoc.getDocumentCatalog();
    PDAcroForm pdAcroForm = pdCatalog.getAcroForm();


    //get all fields in form
    List fields = acroForm.getFields();
    System.out.println(fields.size() + " top-level fields were found on the form");

    //inspect field values
    for (PDField field : fields)
    {
            processField(field, "|--", field.getPartialName());
    }

    ...
}


private void processField(PDField field, String sLevel, String sParent) throws IOException
{
        String partialName = field.getPartialName();

        if (field instanceof PDNonTerminalField)
        {
                if (!sParent.equals(field.getPartialName()))
                {
                        if (partialName != null)
                        {
                                sParent = sParent + "." + partialName;
                        }
                }
                System.out.println(sLevel + sParent);

                for (PDField child : ((PDNonTerminalField)field).getChildren())
                {
                        processField(child, "|  " + sLevel, sParent);
                }
        }
        else
        {
            //field has no child. output the value
                String fieldValue = field.getValueAsString();
                StringBuilder outputString = new StringBuilder(sLevel);
                outputString.append(sParent);
                if (partialName != null)
                {
                        outputString.append(".").append(partialName);
                }
                outputString.append(" = ").append(fieldValue);
                outputString.append(",  type=").append(field.getClass().getName());
                System.out.println(outputString);
        }
}