Dynamic document generation and download

RE: Dynamic document generation and download

Preji P — Wed, 31 Jan 2024 06:59:09 GMT

Thank you very much Steven, above suggestion has worked for me.

RE: Dynamic document generation and download

Harshit Bumb (Appyzie) — Tue, 30 Jan 2024 16:52:56 GMT

You can try what steven mentioned but if it doesn't work, try pasting your button's code here for us to help you debug it.

RE: Dynamic document generation and download

Steven Miccile — Tue, 30 Jan 2024 16:51:36 GMT

Do you just need to replace one of the a!save() parameters with fv!processInfo.pv.docId?

docs.appian.com/.../Start_Process_Smart_Service.html

RE: Dynamic document generation and download

Preji P — Tue, 30 Jan 2024 05:27:20 GMT

Yes I do have activity chaining enabled

RE: Dynamic document generation and download

Harshit Bumb (Appyzie) — Mon, 29 Jan 2024 18:32:38 GMT

Do you have the chaining till the node that generates the DocID?

RE: Dynamic document generation and download

Preji P — Mon, 29 Jan 2024 13:08:22 GMT

hi Mike,
I have similar requirement as mentioned above in my case I have a nested SAIL form and the last form has this download option.
Now I could successfully start PM to generate document but am not able to pass the DocID generated in the process model back to UI
Below you can see the code snippet:

saveInto: a!startProcess(
processModel: cons!DQEM_PM_EXPORT_EXCEL,
processParameters: {
ScorecardReviewDetails: ri!summaryData,
docId: local!documentId
},
onSuccess: {
a!save(ri!document, local!documentId)
}
)

Can you please help me identify the issue here.

Thanks,

Preji

RE: Dynamic document generation and download

Mike Schmitt — Mon, 26 Aug 2019 20:33:30 GMT

Can you confirm whether the document creation processes are chained all the way through?

RE: Dynamic document generation and download

karthip0001 — Mon, 26 Aug 2019 20:00:02 GMT

Hi Mike, quick question related to a document creation. After creating a document using a PDF template, I, as an admin user, am able to get the document id in the OnSuccess event of the process model. But the users are not able to get to the document id in the same event. It always returns null. They are set up as Admins on the folders where the document resides. The documents are showing up as created by them but yet the docid is null. Any thoughts?

RE: Dynamic document generation and download

sureshg57 — Fri, 04 Aug 2017 08:17:58 GMT

HI Sravanis,

At the moment Appian do not have capability to achieve above mentioned scenario via single click I'm afraid.

Regards
Suresh

RE: Dynamic document generation and download

sravanis — Mon, 31 Jul 2017 04:15:45 GMT

Hi Sureshg,

Did you find the solution for the question?

Thanks,
Sravani

RE: Dynamic document generation and download

sureshg57 — Thu, 20 Jul 2017 15:02:48 GMT

Thank you all for taking interest in the scenario and putting effort to come up with a solution. I have been doing more digging into this also but found that , unless we write a new plugin to do this there is no out of the box way as Steven Miccile mentioned. For now I have to live with 2 click to generate the document.

RE: Dynamic document generation and download

Mike Schmitt — Thu, 20 Jul 2017 13:51:01 GMT

Oh, yes I agree - I must have misunderstood or overlooked that part of OP's requirement - as you say it would at least take 2 clicks as far as I know.

However the fact that it CAN be done now in 2 clicks is tremendously better than in older versions (back when my team was asked to provide something like this but it was basically impossible). And I'm hoping the OP's client might find this to be a reasonable compromise.

RE: Dynamic document generation and download

Steven Miccile — Thu, 20 Jul 2017 13:47:30 GMT

I understand that you can generate the document in that model and potentially pass the generated doc id back to the interface, but the use case from the post is also to download the document without the user having to make another click. Once you have passed the document id back to the interface, you would have to generate a SAIL link for the user to make another click. Did you have a way to do the document download without another click from the end-user?

RE: Dynamic document generation and download

Mike Schmitt — Thu, 20 Jul 2017 13:38:19 GMT

In my brief live test before writing my prior comment, I quickly created a new process model with one script task node which sets a value to a particular PV, and what I found is that this value is passed back to the SAIL form successfully in the onSuccess() parameter of a!startProcess.

Assuming this extrapolates out to running the process through some doc generation, it seems like it would work as needed.

RE: Dynamic document generation and download

Steven Miccile — Thu, 20 Jul 2017 12:52:30 GMT

I am not sure you will be able to generate the document and serve it to the user's browser in one click without writing a plugin similar to Excel Tools' download datasubset functionality.

The normal design pattern here is as you and Mike mentioned, which is to request the document is generated with one click then show a subsequent link to download the document. Another thought is to generate the PDFs ahead of time (i.e. when each row that backs the report is entered rather than viewed later), but that requires extra considerations as load and complexity (data updates, etc.) can easily make this a bad fit for the use case.

RE: Dynamic document generation and download

Mike Schmitt — Wed, 19 Jul 2017 19:00:06 GMT

In 17.2 at least, you can use a!startProcess to launch a process model which will do your PDF generation, and pass back the generated doc ID to your SAIL form.