Exporting Appian's Styled Text/HTML content to Word while preserving formatting
Hi everyone,
I am looking for some guidance on an Appian requirement and would appreciate hearing from anyone who has implemented something similar.
We have ‘Extra Long Text(64000)/Long Text fields(4000)’ where users enter content through the Styled Text Editor component. The entered content is stored in the database with the corresponding HTML tags. We now have a requirement to export this data in a Word document while preserving the formatting exactly as entered by the user. This includes:
- Bold, italic, underline,..
- Tables
- Paragraphs and other rich text formatting supported by the Styled Text Editor component
The Word document should ideally retain the original formatting rather than displaying the underlying HTML tags.
Current Approach:
Currently, we are using [Advanced Document Templating - DOCX Document From Template] smart service plugin to generate the Word document by providing a template along with the data in XML format. However, we must strip the HTML tags from the styled text data, otherwise the HTML tags are displayed as text in the generated Word document.
I also tried another smart service from the same plugin [DOCX Document From Html Template], which supports HTML content, but I have not been able to successfully generate the document with the required formatting.
Another consideration is that the export will contain a large set of dynamic data (list), rather than a single data set or a small amount of content.
Has anyone implemented a similar requirement in Appian where Styled Text Editor/HTML-formatted content needs to be exported to Word while preserving the formatting? If so, I would really appreciate it if you could share:
- What approach or plugin you used?
- How you handled the HTML content?
- Whether the tables and other rich-text formatting are preserved?
- Any limitations or considerations you encountered, particularly with larger volumes of dynamic data?
Any suggestions or examples from your experience would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance!