PDF Box
A PDF Box displays one or more pages from a PDF document in the report.
PDF Box (PDFBox type) is a layout container, found in the Drawables group in the Tool Box view. The PDF Box propagates if the PDF has more than one page.
Properties
Select the object on the Report Design page to display its properties in the Properties View.
The Location property specifies the file name and path of the PDF document.
The Password property is used for password-protected documents.
The Page Ranges property specifies the pages to include.
The cropRightWidth, cropBottomWidth, cropLeftWidth, and cropTopWidth properties specify the amount to be cropped from the margins.
Embedding PDFs
To embed a document, use a URL type that allows encoding the data in the body of the URL text. The full syntax of data URLs is:
data:[<MIME-type>][;charset=<encoding>][;base64],<data>
See data URI scheme (Wikipedia link) for a complete description of the concept and the syntax.
For our purposes, it is sufficient to support a simplified subset that omits
the charset and assumes that characters are encoded in UTF-8. Image data is always
encoded in base64 (Wikipedia link) while other data such as HTML content is typically “Percent
encoded” (Wikipedia link).
data:application/pdf;base64,<data>.
To embed PDFs, use the data protocol syntax in the Location property of the
PDFBOX
element:data:application/pdf;base64, followed by the base 64 encoded data of the pdf documentTo automatically construct this URL, click the ... button for the Location property. Choose the file and select the Embed in document check box:
Figure: Embed in document checkbox
Displaying PDFs depending on a variable
In this example, all PDFs are stored in the directory C:/My Docs/pdfs/, and
the PDF name is determined by the field orderline.product.pdf. Enter the following
in the Expression Editor for the Location property:
"file:///C:/My Docs/pdfs/"+orderline.product.pdf.trim()