Is it possible to take a pdf or ms Word and make it a fillible view in mvc and map the Filliable fields to a backend databace such as SQL Server ??

Question

So just to make it clear... I have a PDF or Word document that I want to make into a fillable form in an mvc view.
I would like the data that is typed in to the document's fields sent to the mvc controller so that is can be stored to the
back end database.

Is this even possible. Can you use a PDF / Word Document as a view in mvc, This would save lots of time vs having to make a mvc view with the bootstrap nonsense.
The form is really long and I personally don't want type all this stuff in a format it to fit in the razor view.

But I understand if this is not possible .

Thanks

Answer 1

you can not use a PDF/Word doc as a view directly (though you can display in an iframe if supported by the browser).

You can download file of type PDF/WORD, then upload to the server and process.

If you use word, you could implement WEBDAV support (an http file protocol supported by word), so you could edit directly in word. On WEBDAV saves, you would inspect the word file to see if the form was filled in.

for either of these solutions, you need to pick a library that allows processing of PDF forms, or word files.

you can write a PDF viewer application, (this is companies like docusign did), that supports form entry. This is probably a much larger project.

but it would need to a pretty large form for these projects to less work.