Oracle BI Publisher Blog

Another question on the forum that deserves a bit more than a 5 line answer. Neeraj has been trying to merge PDF documents using the Publisher APIs. From the question I think he has merged the docs but he wants to add a security password on top of the merged docs too.

I am trying to merge multiple pdf document and want to secure the output using pdf security attributes.
Is there a way to achieve this while pdf merge ?

(I am able to do so while generating the pdf using FO Processor but not while merging existing pdf files.)

There are several ways to merge PDFs using APIs, the simplest is the PDFDocMerger API. Its a pretty simple API, just get the documents to be merged into an array, specify the output file and then call the process method.

package pdftester;


 
import java.io.File;
import java.util.Properties; 
import oracle.apps.xdo.XDOException; 
import oracle.apps.xdo.common.pdf.util.PDFDocMerger;


 public class PDFMerger {
    public PDFMerger() {
    
    // Output destination of the merged PDF document.
    File outFile = new File("c:\\temp\\mergePDF.pdf");     
 // PDF documents to be merged.
    File[] inpFiles = new File[2];
    inpFiles[0] = new File("c:\\temp\\1.pdf");
    inpFiles[1] = new File("c:\\temp\\2.pdf");
     // Create PDFDocMerger instance.
    PDFDocMerger pdfMerger = new PDFDocMerger(inpFiles, outFile);
     // Set the security property
    Properties prop = new Properties();
    prop.put("pdf-security","true");
    prop.put("pdf-open-password","welcome");
    pdfMerger.setConfig(prop);
       
    // Run the merging process.
    try {
         pdfMerger.process();
    
        } catch (XDOException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
    }
     public static void main(String[] args) {
        PDFMerger pDFMerger = new PDFMerger();
    }
}

Neeraj wanted to add a password to the resulting document. We can us the setConfig method to set the appropriate properties to set the password.

    // Set the security property
    Properties prop = new Properties();
    prop.put("pdf-security","true");
    prop.put("pdf-open-password","welcome");
    pdfMerger.setConfig(prop);

Of course you can fetch that password from some repository rather than hard coding it.
If you want to have a go, you can get the PDFs and the java from here.