Appending External Documents

DBohner-(db)

Legendary Poster
Maybe One of the CreateForm experts can provide some pointers?

We'd like to append an external document (either a spreadsheet or Word Doc) to a report PDF - in place of the Media Object.

Conceptually - we'd place something like:
FILE:: \\server\folder\spreadsheet.xls
in the text of the media object.

When the report is printed, CF would see the "FILE::" and know to append the document found at the URL.

I've been places where it was done (either through Media Object Text or a Processing Option value in the E1 PDF) - but, I'm not a CreateForm professional.

Can someone offer pointers on how this can be accomplished?

(db)
 
Hi Daniel ... we have done this for a couple of customers, including having it replace the existing E1 output when viewing with Work Submitted Jobs. It does involve a small piece of non JDE / non CRF software to handle the inclusion of the other output. Basically that other piece can allow inclusion of other PDFs, Excel, Word etc etc files in the final merged output.

What version of Create!form are you / your customer on? Do they have Create!form Director or Create!Stream, and do you know if they have the Publishing licence?

By the way, the approach you mentioned (put the file location in the PDF in a specific section via RDA) is exactly the approach we have used. If you want send a message to me and I can fill you in in more detail.

Cheers,

Mike
 
Hi MG,

I'm not sure which version we are using (I'm "Just the E1 guy"). I can follow-up.

We are pursuing a work around.
Instead of placing the entire URL, we are going to have the users maintain a 'drop folder'.
Within the Media Object, users are to put the name of the document "with the suffix" in the first line (document.xls, document.doc or document.whatever).
Then, instead of merging the doc, we are going to use the Email Process to output the form and grab the external docs as attachments.

Thoughts?

(db)
 
Hi Daniel

This may not be exactly what you are after, but you can use create!stream and Create!email to attach a file different to the std pdf. This is commonly used if you wish to email a csv output instead of the pdf. But in principle you can attach any file and you can use the pdf output parameters to construct the URL.
 
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