Q: The way we have implemented jPDFNotes the document is passed around a number of reviewers on a “workflow”. Each reviewer can add notes. Is it possible to “lock up” previous markups, so that new markup data can be added but previous markup data can not be modified?
A: Yes it can be done, but it will require a bit of programming in your implementation:
First, an explanation of the project and its setting: The jPDFNotes product is a component that can be integrated into a Java application or applet. In your case, it was deployed inside an applet (that runs in a web browser) using one of our sample applets. We provide sample applets, with source code, so that our customers can get started quickly and can then customize them to implement logic that is relevant to their system, such as what you describe.
Aside from being a visual component, jPDFNotes also provides a programming API so that when our customers customize their implementation, they can make calls to the API to do a number of functions on PDF documents and their content.
Annotations in a PDF have a flag to mark them as locked or read-only. In your applet, you can add code to loop through all the annotations in the document and mark them as locked or read-only. Once they are marked like this, a user cannot modify or delete the annotations.
This can be done either at the time that a user saves the document back to the server or at the time that a user opens a document that already has annotations on it.
You can also setup the logic, depending on the permissions for each user for instance, so that you only do this based on certain conditions.
