Friday, July 31, 2009

Unlocking PureEdge forms

I was creating an inprocessing web application. It had to serve up many official legal forms. So I couldn't mess with their layout or content much without making them invalid. One of the forms was a locked XFDL PureEdge form. I really needed to get some hardcoded data off the form. The form was base64 encoded and had a lock protection thing set on it.

A normal base64 decoder wouldn't work because of some unicode character problems so I wrote a custom decoder. Once the form was decoded I found the text on and switched it to off and the form was unlocked. Now I could modify it using the pureEdge developer.

This was around a year ago. I've been digging through my emails trying to find all the specific details so I can log them here for myself and for others but I can't find it. So for now I will just write this until I have to re-write the custom decoder later and can better document the steps taken (many frustrating days of work).

4 comments:

  1. Have you ever found/rewritten this decoder?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Open original.xfdl in notepad. Cut/paste everything after
    "application/vnd.xfdl;content-encoding="base64-gzip"" into:
    http://www.opinionatedgeek.com/dotnet/tools/base64decode/
    Click Decode. Save file as new.gz.
    Open new.gz in winzip. Expand file as new.xfdl.
    Open new.xfdl in notepad.
    Change on to off
    You can now open that PureEdge form in PureEdge Designer! :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi, I have been trying to figure out how to accomplish this myself, I have an XFDL file that I want to re-design/edit, but when I decoded it, the file always saves as a .bin file rather than gz. which stops me dead on my track, any suggestions?

      Thank you.

      Delete
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