Secure PDF Documents

Sometimes, developers need to work with encrypted PDF files. For example, they need to secure documents with user and owner passwords so not just anyone can open them, or want to restrict whether the document content can be printed or extracted.

This article explains how to pass in PDF security options when saving spreadsheets to PDF.

Aspose.Cells APIs provide the PdfSecurityOptions class for working with the security of PDF file format. The sample code below describes how to create secured PDF files with Aspose.Cells for Java API.

// For complete examples and data files, please go to https://github.com/aspose-cells/Aspose.Cells-for-Java
// The path to the documents directory.
String dataDir = Utils.getDataDir(SecurePDFDocuments.class);
// Open an Excel file
Workbook workbook = new Workbook(dataDir + "input.xlsx");

// Instantiate PDFSaveOptions to manage security attributes
PdfSaveOptions saveOption = new PdfSaveOptions();

saveOption.setSecurityOptions(new PdfSecurityOptions());
// Set the user password
saveOption.getSecurityOptions().setUserPassword("user");

// Set the owner password
saveOption.getSecurityOptions().setOwnerPassword("owner");

// Disable extracting content permission
saveOption.getSecurityOptions().setExtractContentPermission(false);

// Disable print permission
saveOption.getSecurityOptions().setPrintPermission(false);

// Save the PDF document with encrypted settings
workbook.save(dataDir + "securepdf_test.pdf", saveOption);

If the spreadsheet contains formulas, it is best to call Workbook.calculateFormula() just before rendering it to PDF. This ensures that formula dependent values are recalculated, and the correct values are rendered in the PDF.