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Fillable Form Fields with the same name are broken


Travis Lindsay

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Travis Lindsay

Creating and editing a pdf with "fillable forms" has issues whenever I add a fillable form field that has the same name as another field. It "appears" like the field is working fine until you open up the pdf in another program, (e.g. Adobe Acrobat), then the first field with the same name appears, but all subsequent occurrences of it are missing from the pdf. It seems like if I add fields with the same name to the same page it's fine, but if I have one on a different page that's when the issue occurs. This is a huge pain, and I've had to resort to using other programs to get it to work (e.g. it works fine doing the same thing in Adobe Acrobat), but I'd love to get this fixed in Nitro.

Looking for a workaround online, I saw on other posts that you can solve the issue by simply giving each field a unique name. However we use these fillable form pdfs as reports that we programmatically fill in using xfdf data later, and we rely on the fields that have the same name so we can just fill in repeating data like "FirstName" or "TotalPageNumber" using the same name, and don't have to do some weird hack in our backing data like "TotalPageNumber1" and "TotalPageNumber2..." just to get it to work. I tried submitting this issue via a support ticket, but all I get is "there was an issue submitting your request", so I'm trying my luck here on the forum :)

I'm running Nitro Pro 13.29.2.566, all you need to do to reproduce is add more than one fillable form field with the same name, and copy paste them on different pages, and then open it in Adobe Acrobat (or probably any other pdf editor) and you'll see the missing fields.

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  • 1 year later...
REBECCA LANTZ

13.70.2.40 Yes! I have been having this issue, as well. I see this has not been addressed from 5/2022 as I became fed up and searched for answers today.

So, copy with formatting and paste of, for example, a page 1 field with the exact "text1" as "customer name", - to subsequent pages as page 2 "text1" for the "customer name" will not be filled on those later pages when the info is typed in on page 1. This used to work easily up until version 12, I think!

We have forms with many pages that require a lot of the same information, so I had painstakingly set this up. Now any new changes or updates done, and this does not work. I have tried the forms-select fields-make copies route and it seems to only do 1 or 2 fields of the same type/name on the same page, i.e. "text2" for "date" -date won't fill when there are >2 fields for the date on any 1 page. 

Also, if there is a need to insert a new page that requires much of the same info as other pages into the form file, copying and pasting the fields to the new page will not fill on that new page, either.

Thanks for any help!

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