Section:

Template generation in Appian

Overview

Apryse's office template generation framework enables the dynamic generation of PDFs:

  • You provide a template in the form of an Office document (such as .docx)
  • You provide replacement data in JSON form
  • Apryse SDK will efficiently generate a PDF by merging the data with the template
  • Fully featured, with support for loops, conditionals, images, table generation, etc.
  • Use your preferred office editor to design attractive templates, and Apryse will take care of the rest
  • All logic is entirely contained within the SDK, with no external dependencies

Template Structure

If you have an Office document with template values that look like this:

sh

1{{sender.name}} // object structure

or

sh

1{{first_name}} // normal tag

You can insert values to replace those template placeholders. This can be done in various ways.

Filling a Template

The first is to set the templateDataValues parameter with a object that has keys that match the ones in the template and their associated value. They can be objects as seen in the placeholder key example above. Here is a sample of how this could look like in expression mode in Appian Designer:

sh

1a!localVariables(
2  local!data: a!queryEntity(
3    entity: cons!WT_DS_User,
4    query: a!query(
5      pagingInfo: a!pagingInfo(
6        startIndex: 1,
7        batchSize: -1
8      )
9    )
10  ).data[1],
11  a!headerContentLayout(
12    header: {
13      a!billboardLayout(
14        backgroundMedia: a!documentImage(document: a!EXAMPLE_BILLBOARD_IMAGE()),
15        backgroundColor: "#f0f0f0",
16        marginBelow: "NONE",
17        overlay: a!barOverlay(contents: {})
18      )
19    },
20    contents: {
21      webviewer(
22        label: "WebViewer",
23        labelPosition: "ABOVE",
24        validations: {},
25        height: "AUTO",
26        key: null,
27        url: null,
28        appianDocId: 1249,
29        documentFolder: null,
30        userDisplayName: null,
31        enabledElements: null,
32        disabledElements: null,
33        docAccessConnectedSystem: cons!WT_CS,
34        loadAsPDF: null,
35        enableAnnotations: null,
36        notesInLeftPanel: null,
37        darkMode: null,
38        defaultLanguageCode: null,
39        customCSSPath: null,
40        fullAPI: null,
41        enableRedaction: null,
42        enableMeasurement: null,
43        enableExtractPagesToAppian: null,
44        newSavedDocumentIdValue: null,
45        newSavedDocumentIdSaveInto: null,
46        xfdfAnnotationDataValue: null,
47        xfdfAnnotationDataSaveInto: null,
48        enableDocumentGeneration: true,
49        templateDataValue: {
50          logo: local!data.firstName,
51          date: local!data.firstName,
52          sender: {
53            name: local!data.firstName
54          },
55          dest: {
56            title: "Mr.", /* hardcoded text value */
57            given_name: local!data.firstName, /* value from variable */
58            surname: local!data.lastName,
59            address: "Earth"
60          },
61          client: {
62            full_name: local!data.firstName,
63            gender_posessive: "Male",
64          },
65          lease_problem: "none",
66          land_location: "Earth",
67        }
68      )
69    }
70  )
71)

Manually set values with modal

You can also enable the enableDocumentGeneration parameter to gain access to a modal that allows users to manually set those values. This is, however, limited to just text/numerical values.

Additional documentation

For more details, such as complex use cases like conditionals, loops, images and more visit our WebViewer guide on generating via template.

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