How to parse fillable PDF form in Java

I wanted to figure out how to parse a fillable PDF form in Java, so that i could do some processing on it. So i built this sample PDFFormParsingPOC project that uses Apache PDFBox library. This is simple java class that i built, in which i read the PDF file first and then parse it into PDDocument. Then i can get all the fields in the PDF form by calling PDDocument.getDocumentCatalog().getAcroForm().getFields() and start iterating through it. For every field that i find, first i try to figure out what is the type of the field and then use it to print the field with its name and value to console

	package com.sptech.pdfparsed;
	import org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.PDDocument;
	import org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.PDDocumentCatalog;
	import org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.common.PDMetadata;
	import org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.interactive.form.PDAcroForm;
	import org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.interactive.form.PDCheckbox;
	import org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.interactive.form.PDChoiceField;
	import org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.interactive.form.PDTextbox;
	import java.io.File;
	import java.util.List;
	public class HelloPDFBox {
	public static void listFields(PDDocument doc) throws Exception {
	PDDocumentCatalog catalog = doc.getDocumentCatalog();
	PDMetadata pdMetadata = catalog.getMetadata();
	PDAcroForm form = catalog.getAcroForm();
	List fields = form.getFields();
	System.out.println("Fields " + fields.get(0).getClass());
	for (Object field : fields) {
	if (field instanceof PDTextbox) {
	PDTextbox pdTextbox = (PDTextbox) field;
	System.out.println("PDTextBox " + pdTextbox.getFullyQualifiedName() + " " + pdTextbox.getValue());
	} else if (field instanceof PDChoiceField) {
	PDChoiceField pdChoiceField = (PDChoiceField) field;
	System.out.println("PDChoice Field " + pdChoiceField.getFullyQualifiedName() + " " + pdChoiceField.getValue());
	} else if (field instanceof PDCheckbox) {
	PDCheckbox pdCheckbox = (PDCheckbox) field;
	System.out.println("PDCheckbox Field " + pdCheckbox.getFullyQualifiedName() + " " + pdCheckbox.getValue());
	} else {
	System.out.print(field);
	System.out.print(" = ");
	System.out.print(field.getClass());
	System.out.println();
	}
	}
	}
	public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
	if (args.length != 1) {
	System.out.println("Please specify fully qualified path of the PDF form");
	System.exit(-1);
	}
	String fileName = args[0];
	System.out.println("Parsing PDF Form at " + fileName);
	File file = new File(fileName);
	PDDocument doc = PDDocument.load(file);
	listFields(doc);
	}
	}

view raw HelloPDFBox.java hosted with ❤ by GitHub

You can download the Apache PDFBox project and execute it by passing fully qualified name of the fillable PDF form and it will print out field name value pairs to console. If you dont have a pdf form already you can download Sample Fillable PDF Form