Strait Fram Singapuur

My previous post was about merging the PDF files into single file using PDFBox, the limitation of that approach was if you had fill able form inside any PDF file it was lost, to over come that issue here is an updated version of the same post using iText library.

import java.io.FileOutputStream;
import java.io.InputStream;
import java.io.OutputStream;
import java.net.URL;
import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.List;
import java.util.Set;

import com.lowagie.text.pdf.AcroFields;
import com.lowagie.text.pdf.PdfCopyFields;
import com.lowagie.text.pdf.PdfReader;

/**
 * Merges the PDF files while retaining the fillable forms within them. It also
 * renames form field (to avoid conflicts) which can have an impact if form is
 * submitted to server but for printing purpose should be OK.
 * 
 * @author Munish Gogna
 * 
 */
public class PDFMerge {
 private static int counter = 0;

 public static void merge(List<InputStream> sourcePDFs,
   OutputStream targetPDF) throws Exception {
  if (sourcePDFs != null && targetPDF != null) {
   PdfCopyFields copy = new PdfCopyFields(targetPDF);

   for (InputStream stream : sourcePDFs) {
    PdfReader pdfReader = new PdfReader(stream);
    renameFields(pdfReader.getAcroFields());
    copy.addDocument(pdfReader);
    stream.close();
   }
   copy.close();
  }
 }

 private static void renameFields(AcroFields fields) {
  Set<String> fieldNames = fields.getFields().keySet();
  String prepend = String.format("_%d.", counter++);

  for (String fieldName : fieldNames) {
   fields.renameField(fieldName, prepend + fieldName);
  }
 }

 public static void main(String[] args) {
  try {
   List<InputStream> pdfs = new ArrayList<InputStream>();
   pdfs
     .add(new URL(
       "http://thewebjockeys.com/TheWebJockeys/Fillable_PDF_Sample_from_TheWebJockeys_vC5.pdf")
       .openStream());
   pdfs
     .add(new URL(
       "http://help.adobe.com/en_US/Acrobat/9.0/Samples/interactiveform_enabled.pdf")
       .openStream());
   OutputStream output = new FileOutputStream("merged.pdf");

   merge(pdfs, output);

  } catch (Exception e) {
   e.printStackTrace();
  }
 }

}

The iText jar can be downloaded here

Thanks.

I was just looking for some way to merge PDFs generated from different sources to one final deck. iText library was one obvious choice but when I looked into PDFBox library I was stunned with the simplicity and ease with which PDFs can be merged. I tried merging three different PDF files and to my surprise it took less than 15 lines of code as shown below:

package com.gognamunish.test;

import java.io.File;
import java.io.FileInputStream;
import java.io.InputStream;
import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.List;
import org.apache.pdfbox.util.PDFMergerUtility;

/**
 * Merges pdf files into one final pdf.
 * 
 * @author Munish Gogna
 */
public class PDFMerge {

 public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
  // Get the byte streams from any source (maintain order)
  List<InputStream> sourcePDFs = new ArrayList<InputStream>();
  sourcePDFs.add(new FileInputStream(new File("pdf1.pdf")));
  sourcePDFs.add(new FileInputStream(new File("pdf2.pdf")));
  sourcePDFs.add(new FileInputStream(new File("pdf3.pdf")));

  // initialize the Merger utility and add pdfs to be merged
  PDFMergerUtility mergerUtility = new PDFMergerUtility();
  mergerUtility.addSources(sourcePDFs);
  // set the destination pdf name and merge input pdfs
  mergerUtility.setDestinationFileName("merged.pdf");
  mergerUtility.mergeDocuments();
 }
}

The library is rich and provides many options out of the box that can be useful when it comes to playing with PDFs, worth a try !!!

http://pdfbox.apache.org/index.html
 cheers, Munish Gogna

Do you wish to keep notes where the notes keep the date automatically? Well here is an awesome trick for you. All you need is notepad.


1) Open a blank notepad file.
2) Type .LOG in all caps at the top and hit enter.
3) Now save the file.
4) After closing the file, reopen it and notice that the date & time is now listed on the second line.
5) Also notice that the cursor is ready for you to start typing on the very next line.
6) Now every time you open it, type something on the next line and then save it, when you reopen it, it will have automatically saved the date and time on the last line.

It keeps a running record of date and time for each save. Now you have a cheap diary! Congrats!

source:centralbeat

First thing I would like to admit is - Sorry for being away for so long !!!
Next let's quickly move to second thing which is the topic of today's very simple post - scheduling jobs in JBoss :)

In many projects there is a requirement for cron-like task scheduling, be it for batch processing, automatic system maintenance or some other regular job. Few days back I had to create a cron job to sync data from external source to the local database. I was having so many options to implement the functionality like:

• java.util.Timer
  
• EJB Timers
  
• Unix Cron jobs
  
• Quartz Scheduler
  
• Custom Timer
  

But in the end I settled for a very simple solution (in terms of time it took to implement the whole stuff) that is as effective as anything mentioned above.

org.jboss.varia.scheduler.Scheduler
----------------------------------------
The good thing is, this Scheduler directly invokes a callback on an instance of a user defined class, or an operation of a user specified MBean. Let's say we want to print 'Hello World!' (our so called task) after every 30 seconds from the the time of deployment.

package com.gognamunish.test;
import org.jboss.varia.scheduler.Schedulable;
/**
* Implement Schedulable interface and override perform() function. 
* @author Munish Gogna
*/
public class HelloWorld implements Schedulable
{
    public void perform( Date now, long remainingRepetitions ) {
        System.out.println("Hello World");
    }
}

Next just copy the following mbean definition in /deploy/scheduler-service.xml file of the Jboss profile.

      true
      com.gognamunish.test.HelloWorld
      0
      30000
      -1
      true    

      
   

Once the deployment is done, this task will be called after every 30 seconds, so easy and simple right? We can also pass input parameters to our target class using 'SchedulableArguments' attribute, just make sure you define the right constructor in the class that implements Schedulable interface. e.g If we want to pass the location and environment of the server, we have to add following lines to the mbean definition:

Singapore,Test
 java.lang.String,java.lang.String

HelloWorld class now has to define a constructor as follow:

public HelloWorld (String location, String environment){
 this.location=location;
 this.environment=environment;
}

Note: This example has dependency on scheduler-plugin.jar which can be obtained from /common/lib folder of $JBOSS_HOME (it is sad that it's not available in maven or jboss repository)

Give it a Try !!!!

The only word that come to my mind is WOW, as can be seen it has:

> Sorting feature
> Pagination feature
> Search feature
> Simple and clean design

Thanks everyone.