Defining document templates and generation of PDFs

BMC Helix Business Workflows provides case business analysts the ability to define document templates for generating PDF documents for information requested by a user. For example, when an employee requests for an experience letter, or an official visa letter PDF documents with the required details can be automatically generated and sent to the employee. 

The process of generating a formatted PDF involves the following tasks:

1. Create a document template to define content, format, and structure of the document. 
   • Add tables or images, if required. 
   • Add case specific information, add the case related dynamic fields as variables in the template. The variables are populated with the current case details when generating the PDF document. 
2. Add the Generate PDF element to any process that requires a PDF document output
   
   • Add the appropriate document template as an input parameter to the element. Content of the document template is converted and presented in a PDF by using the Generate PDF element.
   • Define an output action for the PDF document. The generated PDF can be used for various case related activities like sending as an attachment via email notification and attaching the document to a case in the Activity field as a case related document, and so on.

The following image provides a quick reference for this process:

Support for language fonts in PDFs

To make sure that characters from fonts, such as Thai fonts are visible in PDFs, you must contact BMC Customer Support to enable the special characters. BMC Customer Support will set the value of the PDF_FONT parameter to Arial Unicode MS in the com.bmc.dsm.shared-services-lib library.

Where to go from here

The following table lists the topics that you can refer to learn more about generating PDFs: