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Posted to users@pdfbox.apache.org by Brzrk One <br...@gmail.com> on 2016/04/21 17:26:02 UTC

Can a nameddest trigger an Action?

Executive Summary:
In pdfbox 1.8.9 or 1.8.11, is it possible to convince an Annotation to
un-hide itself as a result of gotoNamedDestination? If so, how?

Background:
I spent a little time trying (unsuccessfully, obviously) to make this work,
but before I dig into it, it would be good to know if it is possible...

We have an application that adds annotations and named destinations to a
PDF, along with an OpenAction script that queries the URL to figure out
which named destination to go to, and which annotation(s) to make visible.

This works fine in many browsers.
But we are switching to Chrome, and it doesn't work there (no URL passed to
PDF).

What does work is the parameter '#nameddest=destname'.
That opens the document positioned to the correct page, but does not make
the proper annotation(s) visible.

If I knew which named dest was being acted upon, that would be enough to
find the annotation(s) and make them visible. But I don't see anything in
the  PDF JS API docs to support this. (Did I miss something?)

So (finally getting to the question), is it possible to invoke an Action as
a result of goto named destination?

The PDF Reference (1.7) says in Destinations( 8.2.1):

> The value of this entry is a dictionary in which each key is a destination
> name and the corresponding value is either an array defining the
> destination, using the syntax shown in Table 8.2, or a dictionary with a D
> entry whose value is such an array. The latter form allows additional
> attributes to be associated with the destination, as well as enabling a
> go-to action (see "Go-To Actions" on page 654) to be used as the target of
> a named destination.


Then in Action Dictionaries (8.5.1), it says:
>
> The action dictionary’s Next entry (PDF 1.2) allows sequences of actions
> to be chained together.


So, if the named dest has a GotoAction that, essentially, named itself, but
that Action dictionary included a Next action that was a Hide action on the
annotation, would that produce the result I want? (I can copy PDActionHide
from 2.0.)

Thanks in advance for your help.