RE: Plugin to merge documents together

Rahul Gundu — Mon, 30 Nov 2015 18:20:29 GMT

There is a plug-in in shared components called Docx Merge. It will merge multiple documents into one. follow the below link forum.appian.com/.../summary

RE: Plugin to merge documents together

ryanh — Fri, 27 Nov 2015 18:20:36 GMT

Attached are some screen shots of the PDF Tools 'merge' node being used in my prototype example to merge multiple pdf files into 1 pdf.

RE: Plugin to merge documents together

ryanh — Fri, 27 Nov 2015 18:04:09 GMT

I made a quick prototype a few months ago using the PDF Tools shared component forum.appian.com/.../summary and it seemed to work well. I had an existing process model that created a summary of a process in a 1 page pdf. I wanted to try to then create a similar summary for each of the children records (N #) and append them to the parent pdf file. I cloned the process model, cloned the individual node that made a pdf and had that copied node run N number of times, once for each child record in my db (which actually had data from multiple places). The nodes run, create individual 1 page pdf files with incremented file names and they are stored temporarily in my knowledge center folder specific to the running process. Then, I used the merge node available to make a single PDF with the parent process pages (could be more than 1 page), and then each of the children pdf files behind it. My proof of concept worked great. I think there are other pdf related components that might support this, including the one above, but the pdftools one seemed to work.

As a side note, a coworker recently needed to create a multi-row table in a PDF and the normal tools to do this would have been problematic because the size of the table could vary and possibly span a 2nd page of the pdf. He hasn't completely finished the solution yet and presented it to us or deployed to production, but here is his rough steps:

Our business partners wanted us to generated a document that was a little too complicated to generate as a HTML template document. It contained a table (of various length – depending on the transaction) – which would leave a large white space if we used a PDF template. What we really wanted to do is generate a Word document in Appian that contained a table that can vary in length.

A Word .docx file is actually a .zip file in disguise. So, the first thing you do is change the name to .zip and open the archive. Inside the archive, you’ll find a /word/document.xml file. This is what you need to generate to create a formatted Word content.

Here’s a quick rundown of the steps involved:

          1) Rename your word.docx file to a word.zip file.
          2) Pull the formatted document.xml file from a word.docx (located in the zip file under the \\word directory
          3) Save the word.zip file (minus the document.xml) as a template in Appian (include ###variables###)
          4) Generate the document.xml file in Appian. (a lot of XML constants, expression rules, etc)
                    a. Generate your table using Word’s XML
                    b. Insert your variables throughout the document.xml file and insert your table as a Word XML string
          5) Place your document.xml file back inside your world.zip template file
          6) Save your new document as word.docx

RE: Plugin to merge documents together

sikhivahans — Fri, 27 Nov 2015 16:58:31 GMT

@rajatm Not sure if you are already aware of this - did you check 'Dynamic Document Generator' shared component?