title: How to access full Adobe Acrobat AcroExch COM API from Internet Explorer embedded object?
body: <p>I have the following situation:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Internet Explorer 9 on Windows 7 SP1 32-bit</li>
  <li>Adobe Acrobat Professional version 10</li>
  <li>A webpage with code like this:</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p><code>&lt;object data="foo.pdf" src="foo.pdf"&gt;</code></p>
  
  <p>Given that:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>The default PDF reader on the system is Adobe Acrobat</li>
  <li>Adobe Reader's browser plugin is suppressed in favor of Acrobat's plugin</li>
  <li>Acrobat.exe is running when the plugin loads</li>
  <li>I'm using Internet Explorer's COM automation (from Ruby, but that doesn't really matter) to obtain a reference to the <code>object</code>'s <code>AxAcroPDFLib.AxAcroPDF</code> object</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>With this <code>AxAcroPDFLib.AxAcroPDF</code> object, I need to manipulate form fields, read text, and do other stuff that is perfectly reasonable to do with the <code>AcroExch.PDDoc</code> API, and then click a button on the webpage (using IE automation) to serialize the form fields to XML and save them to the webserver.</p>
  
  <p>I need to test this "end to end" from a user perspective due to business requirements, so I can't just stuff values in the XML and see if the server takes them.</p>
  
  <p>Is there any way to access the <code>AcroExch.PDDoc</code> APIs of the opened PDF document from the <code>AxAcroPDFLib.AxAcroPDF</code> reference, <strong>without</strong> saving the PDF to a file on disk and opening it in using <code>AcroExch.App</code>? </p>
  
  <p>The problem is that if I save it to disk and re-open it in Acrobat, that file cannot be used to save and submit the form field data to the web server, as far as I know. (<em>Or can it</em>?)</p>