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I am looking for some guidance on generating large PDF documents in Appian.We have an existing site page that displays more than 13,000 records. As part of an export feature, we retrieve the data, generate XML content, generate a word document and then convert it to PDF (using Advanced Document Templating plugin).
Currently, the export process retrieves around 3,000 records. Each record contains several large text fields (around 5 - 6 columns) so the overall amount of content is quite large. The word document is generated successfully and is about 768 KB in size and has approximately 5 million characters.
The issue occurs during the word to PDF conversion. The conversion starts, but it appears to consume significant resources and causes the environment to become unavailable.
My questions are:
1. Are there any known character limits for Word to PDF conversion plugin?2. Are there any alternative plugins or approaches that are better suited for large documents?
I understand that reducing the amount of data being exported may be an option, and I will discuss that with the product owner. However, before making any functional changes, I would like to understand the technical limitations and best practices for handling large document conversions in Appian.Any suggestions would be appreciated.Thanks!
Discussion posts and replies are publicly visible
No clear published character limit large DOCX->PDF exports fail due to in-memory conversion/resource constraints, not character count. Best fix is to split into smaller batches (and merge) and run the conversion async/offline rather than in an interactive interaction. For tabular data at this volume, Excel export is far more scalable than PDF.Still worth trying https://community.appian.com/b/appmarket/posts/convert-docx-to-pdf-aspose