Sibling and child elements

The PDF source elements doc2.pdf and doc3.pdf are siblings. That is, they appear at the same level of the hierarchy and have the same parent. When sibling elements provide the same type of content, their content is aggregated to contribute content to their parent. In the example, the pages from doc2.pdf and doc3.pdf are combined to produce the result.

In some cases, the order of sibling elements is significant in determining the result. For PDF elements, as in the example above, the order is significant because a PDF document contains sequential pages. Therefore, the pages from doc3.pdf are appended to the pages from doc2.pdf to produce the result, since doc3.pdf appears after doc2.pdf. Other elements whose order is significant when they appear as siblings are Bookmarks, TableOfContents, and BlankPage.

For other elements, such as Comments, order is not significant because the comments have identifying characteristics indicating where they should appear in the document.

The next two examples show the distinction between siblings and children.

Example: Aggregating bookmark content using sibling elements

<PDF result="doc1.pdf">

	<PDF source="doc2.pdf"/>

	<Bookmarks source="doc3.xml"/>

</PDF>

In the example above, the PDF result element obtains its content from its child elements. The first child is a PDF source element that provides PDF content to the result. The second child is a Bookmarks element that specifies an XML stream containing bookmarks.

The source document doc2.pdf provides PDF page content but also provides other content types that are inherent to PDF. These types may include bookmarks, links, comments, and file attachments. Because the Bookmarks source element in the example above is a sibling to the PDF source element, bookmarks from doc3.xml are appended to any bookmarks that may already exist in doc2.pdf. That aggregation becomes the bookmarks in the result.

In the following example, by contrast, bookmarks from one source replace those in another. (Unlike result elements, source elements can be children of other source elements.)

Example: Using a child element to replace content in the parent

<PDF result="doc1.pdf">

	<PDF source="doc2.pdf">

		<Bookmarks source="doc3.xml"/>

	</PDF>

</PDF>

In this example, as in the previous one, the PDF page content of the result is provided by doc2.pdf. However, the Bookmarks element is a child of the PDF source element rather than a sibling. Therefore, since the bookmarks content of doc2.pdf is considered to be provided by its child elements, any bookmarks that may exist in doc2.pdf are replaced by those in doc3.xml.

Current page: http://livedocs.adobe.com/livecycle/es/sdkHelp/programmer/sdkHelp/assemblePDFDDX_basics.95.7.html