Add PdfPCell to Paragraph

Question

I'm trying to add a TextField (acrofield) in the middle of a Paragraph sentence using iTextSharp. An example would be "The Effective Date is [Day] day of [Month], [Year] that this will begin."

Things I have tried:

Paragraph para1 = new Paragraph();
para1.Add(New Phrase("The Effective Date is",fontBold));
    //The next line is where it breaks, "Insertion of illegal Element: 30"
para1.Add(CreateTextField("Day",1,0)); //this function returns a PdfPCell.

---

PdfPCell tempCell = new PdfPCell();
tempCell.AddElement(new Phrase("The Effective Date is",fontBold));
    //the next line breaks as well, "Element not allowed."
tempCell.AddElement(CreateTextField("Day",1,0));

---

Paragraph para1 = new Paragraph();
para1.Add(New Phrase("The Effective Date is",fontBold));
para1.AddSpecial(CreateTextField("Day",1,0));
    //This doesn't generate an error, but the TextField is not displayed on PDF

---

Paragraph para1 = new Paragraph();
PdfPTable tempTable = new PdfPTable(1);
para1.Add(New Phrase("Hello",fontBold));
tempTable.AddCell(CreateTextField("Day",1,0));
para1.Add(tempTable);
para1.Add(New Phrase("World",fontBold));
    //This doesn't generate an error, but the TextField is not displayed on PDF

I know the CreateTextField(...) works because I am using it in several other places on the page.

How can I add a TextField inline with other text without using tables and tediously trying to manipulate cell size to accommodate what I need?

Thanks for the help!

Answer 1

Your question is wrong. You don't want to add a PdfPCell to a Paragraph . You want to create inline form fields. That's a totally different question.

Take a look at the GenericFields example. In this example, we create the Paragraph you need like this:

Paragraph p = new Paragraph();
p.add("The Effective Date is ");
Chunk day = new Chunk("     ");
day.setGenericTag("day");
p.add(day);
p.add(" day of ");
Chunk month = new Chunk("     ");
month.setGenericTag("month");
p.add(month);
p.add(", ");
Chunk year = new Chunk("            ");
year.setGenericTag("year");
p.add(year);
p.add(" that this will begin.");

Do you see how we add empty Chunk s where you want to add a PdfPCell ? We use the setGenericTag() method on these Chunk object to add a form field where ever the Chunk s are rendered.

For this to work, we need to declare a page event:

writer.setPageEvent(new FieldChunk());

The FieldChunk class looks like this:

public class FieldChunk extends PdfPageEventHelper {
    @Override
    public void onGenericTag(PdfWriter writer, Document document, Rectangle rect, String text) {
        TextField field = new TextField(writer, rect, text);
        try {
            writer.addAnnotation(field.getTextField());
        } catch (IOException ex) {
            throw new ExceptionConverter(ex);
        } catch (DocumentException ex) {
            throw new ExceptionConverter(ex);
        }
    }
}

Every time a "generic chunk" is rendered, the onGenericTag() method will be called passing the parameter we used in the setGenericTag() method as the text parameter. We use the writer , rect and text parameters to create and add a TextField . The result looks like this:

Feel free to adapt rect if you want to create a bigger text field.

Important: my example is written in Java. If you want to port the example to C#, just change the first letter of each method to upper case (eg change add() into Add() ). If that doesn't work, try setting the parameter as a member variable (eg change writer.setPageEvent(event) into writer.PageEvent = event ).

Update: If you want to make the field bigger, you should create a new Rectangle . For instance:

Rectangle rect2 = new Rectangle(rect.Left, rect.Bottom - 5, rect.Right, rect.Top + 2);
TextField field = new TextField(writer, rect2, text);