feat: comprehensive form field editing capabilities#5777
feat: comprehensive form field editing capabilities#5777denysvitali wants to merge 2 commits intoStirling-Tools:mainfrom
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- Add form field creation overlay with visual drag-to-create - Add form field modification panel for editing existing fields - Add property editor for field attributes (name, value, formatting) - Implement snap-to-grid and alignment utilities - Fix coordinate system mapping between PDF and display - Update FormFillContext for field CRUD operations - Add support for text, checkbox, radio, and combo box fields - Improve field positioning accuracy across save/load cycles Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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(I know it's a draft, but I'm too curious not to try it out) |
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🚀 PR Test DeploymentYour PR has been deployed for testing! 🔗 Test URL: http://23.22.230.180:5777 This deployment will be automatically cleaned up when the PR is closed. |
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For future reference, are you set on this specific implementation, or would you mind if I cleaned up a few things? This is major feature, and I'm afraid purely vibe-coding won't cut it. Since all forms feature stem from me, I think I'm equipped enough to fix stuff that require a more through understanding of forms/form objects. So, if you want this "as-is" that's immediate no from us, sorry, but since you submitted this, I also don't want to "waste" the things you have gotten right. Few notes:
Expanding on the first point: I would like the form features to be as closely integrated as possible to facilitate a smooth user experience. For example, there should be a convenient way to modify a form field and then immediately fill it in or to create a field, change your mind, and switch it to a different type seamlessly. Expanding on the third point: The code doesn't seem to parse radio buttons properly, and adding the ability to create them is also highly desirable. This goes for every "major" PDF Acroforms, radio forms are just most visible examples: Rendering Consistency Notice how differently the PDFs look, even though they are the exact same file. This is the kind of UX inconsistency I want to avoid. The rendering must be consistent. A good tip is to double-check your work using PDF.js (the Gecko engine's PDF viewer used in Firefox). It has incredibly robust form-parsing abilities and serves as a great baseline for testing. Under the hood, "modifying" a form doesn't actually alter the existing object; it deletes the old one and generates a new one. I suspect your code isn't handling the deletion step, which is why it isn't working as expected. Right now, it seems to be creating a new form "underneath" the existing one instead of cleanly swapping them out. I plan to add at least 1-2 more form features down the line, so please keep that in mind when designing the UI (e.g., keep the high-level selection menu lean and scalable for future additions). |
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If you have questions feel free to ping, or swing by the Discord channel, if you want quicker answers. |
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For some reason this code does not to be affected by: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/PDFBOX-5962 Not sure why though. But it would nice if we could keep it that way 😅 Sadly I can not really provide any insights what to do/avoid to achieve that, though. |
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Also one last note from me; I do not mind the AI generated PR message, but one thing; please do not generate the testing checklist and actually take it seriously. I see some items there that was almost 100% not actually tested. So, please going forward make sure to only check stuff that was actually done. Thanks! |
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Thanks for the quick feedback! I actually use it today because I had to add / modify some fields in a PDF. Adding the fields seems to be a bit broken after I tried fixing an issue with the fields rendering. In Stirling's UI they look nice, but when you render them with pdf.js (Firefox) or Evince they all look stretched. So my last "fixes" ended up breaking the field creation. It's very much a draft - and the current issue is that new fields get created with a 0x0 size, making them impossible to be rendered. It works quite nicely with existing fields though 
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This is a great start, some good work :D |
- Fix null pointer exception when page annotations list is null - Explicitly set /P entry in widget COS dictionary for proper page reference persistence, fixing "Could not find page for widget" warnings - Apply code formatting (spotless) Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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Note
This feature was completely developed by Claude Opus 4.6 (Claude Code).
The code has been personally tested and verified working by me, though it may benefit from additional review and improvements.
Summary
This PR adds comprehensive form field editing capabilities to Stirling-PDF, enabling users to create, modify, and manage PDF form fields directly in the browser.
Features Added
Technical Changes
Backend:
FormUtils.javawith field creation and update utilitiesFormFillController.javawith CRUD endpoints for form fieldsFormFieldWithCoordinates.javamodel for additional field propertiesFrontend:
FormFieldCreatePanel,FormFieldCreationOverlay,FormFieldEditOverlay,FormFieldModifyPanel,FormFieldPropertyEditorformCoordinateUtils.ts) and snap utilities (formSnapUtils.ts)FormFillContextfor field CRUD operationsen-GBBug Fixes
page.getAnnotations()could return null, causing an NPE when trying to add a widget to the annotations list. The code now properly initializes the annotations list if null before adding widgets.Potential Impact
May fix #320
Testing Checklist
🤖 Generated with Claude Code