QAT Publisher 2010

This release includes the ability to fill PDF forms. In previous versions of QAT Publisher, PDFs could only be generated by designing the document using a stylesheet editor, and at runtime applying this stylesheet to produce the final result. While this approach is acceptable for typical reports and documents, the use of PDF forms is dramatically faster and easier for detailed forms that contain a lot of static text, specialized formatting, graphical elements, and placeholders for field contents. The majority of forms used by companies are either provided by third parties (government, partners) or by other departments within the company. Redesigning those forms using a stylesheet editor takes time and can be tedious, since every change on the original form would have to be reflected on the stylesheet design.

QAT Publisher 2010 now includes a feature that inspects existing PDF forms and creates a publication that maps data from a CA Gen application into the fields of a PDF form. Using this feature, CA Gen applications can fill out fields in a blank PDF form and save the corresponding result as the final version. Since QAT Publisher uses custom functions in CA Gen, all this is done with no External Action Blocks. QAT Publisher will generate regular Action Blocks in the model, which can be fully traced using the CA Gen’s Trace tool.

As with any other type of publication created using QAT Publisher, this new feature is available for multiple environments, including C, Java and .Net.