Information
  • Author: Appian Corporation
  • Type: Plug-in (Function & Smart Service)
  • Support: This plug-in or utility is not supported by the author. The content is free to use with a licensed product, but it is made available as-is and Community supported.
  • Industry: All Industries
  • Compatible Version(s): 23.2
  • First Released:
  • Last Updated:
  • Cost: Free
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Home » AppMarket » Dynamic Document Generator

Dynamic Document Generator

Overview

This version is for Appian 23.2 and above. Cloud customers on a lower version of Appian that want to install this plugin should open a support case. Self-managed customers can find the latest jar for Appian 23.1 and lower version in the folder pre-23.2

Convert, merge and generate DOCX, PDF and XML files automatically in an Appian process

Key Features & Functionality

  • PDF from single DOCX with Fonts
    • Convert multiple DOCX files into a single PDF. Please note that the translation from DOCX to PDF is not always 1:1. The template may need to be tweaked or simplified to achieve the desired results.
  • PDF from DOCX without Fonts
    • Convert multiple DOCX files into a single PDF. Please note that the translation from DOCX to PDF is not always 1:1. The template may need to be tweaked or simplified to achieve the desired results. This will not support fonts.
  • PDF from XSL-FO Transformation
    • Uses XSLT to convert an XML to XSL-FO which is then converted to PDF
  • PDF from HTML
    • Converts an HTML document into a single page PDF.
  • PDF from HTML Transformation
    • Uses XSLT to convert an XML to HTML which is then converted to PDF
  • Text Doc from XSLT
    • Uses XSLT to convert an XML to a plain text document (such as HTML, another XML doc, etc).
  • DOCX from XHTML With Styling
    • Converts a valid XHTML file into a DOCX, allowing you to provide your own template file for style reference. Useful for creating dynamic documents that are editable
  • DOCX Merge
    • Merges one or more DOCX files together. If a header or footer exists in any document, they will be removed during the merge process.
    • A configurable separator can be specified: none, line break or page break

Function: xsltransform - Transform source XML using XSL Transform

Anonymous
Parents

  • For anyone using DOCX from XHTML a few useful notes for you: 

    • To access MS Word standard styles (like Title, Heading1, Normal, etc.) format your HTML body as so
      • Title Example: <p class="Title">Your Title Here</p>
      • Heading1 Example: <p class="Heading1">Heading Text</p>
      • Basically the point being is that you should us <p> tags for all of your text and specify the formatting class as the class
        • This will allow MS Word to register the style for the navigation pane
    • It's worth noting that although MS Word identifies the style applied to text, it will not use the default style of MS Word (this tripped me up for a while)
      • You should create a document in word with some styles applied and save as an HTML and grab the relevant CSS style definitions out of the CSS and put it in a constant or something that you add to the <head> of your HTML by default
      • Make sure that you set your CSS class names to p.<msWordStyle> (eg: p.Title, p.Heading1, etc.)
        • This will allow your class to both be recognized by MS Word and will allow you to apply a style to the text so that it looks decent on openning the document
      • It's also worth noting that the CSS created by MS Word has non-standard tags in it generally of the format "mso-style..."
        • You can remove these as they won't do anything for you and will just take up space
    • Also remember the main difference between XHTML and HTML is that all attributes must have "" around them!!!

    Happy document generation everyone!

  • in reply to Ilan Gold

    Hey Illan, your post was probably the most helpful among anything else I found on the web. So thanks for that! I do have one question though: Do you know a way to insert a page break into docx so that the first element on the new page is a Heading1 element? The problems I've encountered so far is that if I wrap a page break around <p> tags, the first line of the new page is empty. And if I put in multiple classes inside a <p> tag, only the first class renders. Let me know if you know of any workarounds!

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  • in reply to Ilan Gold

    Hey Illan, your post was probably the most helpful among anything else I found on the web. So thanks for that! I do have one question though: Do you know a way to insert a page break into docx so that the first element on the new page is a Heading1 element? The problems I've encountered so far is that if I wrap a page break around <p> tags, the first line of the new page is empty. And if I put in multiple classes inside a <p> tag, only the first class renders. Let me know if you know of any workarounds!

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