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:

automatedPDFProcess.png

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.

Best practices
After the language fonts are enabled, we recommend that you use the following best practices to create PDF templates:

  • Use the PDF document template editor that is available by default in BMC Helix Business Workflows to author documents.
  • If you use different tools, such as Microsoft Word, use standard fonts, such as Arial.
    Alternatively, you can create your documents in NotePad++, and make sure that you do not include any non-ASCII characters. You can then copy the content directly into the PDF template in BMC Helix Business Workflows.
  • To display of Thai language fonts, use the Arial font family.

Support for adding generated PDFs in social interactions

To add the generated PDFs in the social activity feed of a case, you must add the Add Public Activity element to the automated process that is created for generating the PDF. The case activity feed is displayed in the service request that is created in BMC Helix Digital Workplace Advanced, ensuring that the requester can access the generated PDFs from the comments of the service request. Learn more about how to add the Add Public Activity element to a process in To add generated PDFs to social activities.

Where to go from here

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

Description

Reference

Generate PDF documents for requesters

Example of how a PDF is generated for a visa letter request


 

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