Create Documents

Key Concepts

• Creating a Word template
• Formatting fields for use in template
• Populating the template
• Converting to PDF
• Sending for e-signature

Autogenerated Transcript

Welcome back to Catalytic enter last couple of videos, we went over how to create a webform trigger to capture information, as well as how to send a webform via email for a basic approval process regarding a purchase order.

In this video, we’re going to be using a similar process with filling out a webform to trigger our Workflow.

But instead of sending the information about our purchase via a web form, we’re going to be generating a Word document, converting it to PDF and sending it for a signature to get approval.

We’re going to start by making a new Workflow from scratch.

So let’s go ahead and navigate over to that Workflows tab.

And hit create a Workflow.

And again, we’re just going to choose from a blank template.

And like always, let’s go ahead and give it a name and description.

For the name, I’m going to keep it something that’s easy to keep track of.

So it’s going to be purchase order document generation.

And for our description, let’s go ahead and fill that out.

So again, this will be that same process of submitting a webform to submit a purchase order, but we’ll just have a document being generated to actually have the details of that rather than approve or deny it from a webform, we’re not going to have any approval pattern in this Workflow, it’s just going to be document generation, and then send for a signature.

So let’s just go ahead and hit create.

Okay, great.

Now that we’ve created our Workflow, we’re going to set up our webform trigger, and then after our form fields, and we’re going to be using the same fields as last time with our other purchase order process.

So let’s go ahead and click Add a trigger.

And we’re going to scroll down and select webform.

And let’s go ahead and add this trigger, I’m gonna go ahead and give our trigger a name, again, keeping it something on the nose, so it’s easy to keep track of, and I’ll give it a description as well.

For our form title, because it’s a purchase order process, I’m just gonna call it purchase order information.

And I will go ahead and fill out that form instructions as well have that copied, so I’m just gonna go ahead and paste it.

And I’m going to go ahead and fill out this form URL.

Now just remember that this does have to be unique for each of your web forms in your instance.

So just make sure that the URL is something that makes sense and is unique in your instance.

And I’m going to go ahead and right click and open that in a new tab.

So we can see what that form looks like later, once we add our fields.

That’s everything that I’m going to fill out.

So I’m just going to go ahead and save our trigger.

Now that we’ve added our trigger, we just need to create those form fields that we’re going to be filling out when we submit this purchase order.

So I’m going to scroll down and add these form fields.

Again, these are going to be the same fields that we used in the last two videos.

So the purchase order process for that simple approval process.

So I’m going to go fairly quickly through creating these, but feel free to refer to video five, if you need any more help setting these up.

As a side note, because it’s a similar process, and we’re using the same fields, you could go ahead and reuse that purchase order process that we built in the last two videos, and just remove any of the steps that you actually have in the Workflow.

That way you don’t have to go through the process of creating a new trigger and form fields for this flow.

But if you’ve been following along, then we can go ahead and make a new one as well either works, I’m gonna go ahead and add all these form fields.

So we’re going to add the name, email the mailing address the item that will be purchasing the quantity and I’m going to make sure that that is a integer and integer or a whole number.

The total cost and I’m going to change that to a decimal.

And then the date that is needed by and again, that will be a date.

I’m going to add one more field this time and instance field instance fields are useful when referencing a field that is a constant value.

In this case, it’ll be the purchase order template that we want to use to create our Word document.

So I’m going to go ahead and scroll up to instance fields and add a field.

And this is the same setup process as adding form fields.

So let’s go ahead and configure our field.

I’m just going to call this a document template.

And I’m going to go ahead and change the type to a file because we want it to actually be that Word document that’s going to be our template for the default value.

I’m going to go ahead and choose the purchase order template that I actually have set up.

And I’m going to go ahead and save this and I’ll make sure to show you guys what that template looks like once we get to that in a bit.

Now that all our fields are set up, I’m just going to go ahead and close the triggers and fields section.

And now we’re going to add the first step.

into our Workflow.

Again, because Catalytic is a no code platform, we’re just going to describe the process we want to occur.

So what we’re going to have happen is have a Word document be generated from a template, convert that to PDF, and then send it for a signature.

So let’s describe that first part, generate word doc, I’m gonna go ahead and add that step.

And Catalytic graph the right action of creating a Word document.

Let’s go ahead and configure this action.

Now.

For our template file, you could keep it as a static value if you want.

But I’m gonna go ahead and choose via field because we already set up that instance field that’s holding our template.

So I’m just going to go ahead and select that document template.

Now because it’s an instance field that we’re pointing to, in case it was referenced anywhere else in our Workflow, and we wanted to change that actual value, all we’d have to do is just go back to our triggers in fields, open that instance field, and then select a new value.

So again, this just helps when you’re referencing the same constant value throughout your Workflow.

So it just helps to hold a constant or a static variable.

Before we save this step, let’s go over how document generation from templates works within Catalytic and how to create those templates.

I created this template in Google Docs and downloaded it as a Word document.

And let’s real quick talk about how that was done with field references.

If I expand the global fields on the right side, we can copy and paste these different fields into our actions.

So that way, we can pass data in and out and reference them.

But what happens if we paste these outside of Catalytic? Testing, testing, okay, okay, 123.

To show you an example, I’m going to go ahead and click on mailing address, and we can copy that field.

Now, I’m just going to go over to the actual purchase order template that I created.

And I’m going to go ahead and copy or sorry, paste that value into our template.

Now you’re gonna notice that it has the same name as that field inside these curly brackets, and any spaces now replaced with that hyphen.

This is how field references and document generation works within Catalytic, it will paste it in this field reference format.

And then Catalytic will search the document for these field references.

And if they match up with the name of the actual fields in the Workflow, we’ll input that value.

So kind of like Find and Replace or mail merge.

So going back to our Workflow real quick, let’s go ahead and save our step and talk about this keep unmatched fields option.

So in case we had any field references that weren’t actually fields in our Workflow, you can decide whether or not you want to keep those values or go ahead and delete that field reference inside of your document.

Now that we have that setup, let’s just go ahead and save your step.

So the next step in our process is going to be converting that Word document that we generated from a template into a PDF.

So let’s just do the same thing as before, add a new step and describe that process.

So let’s go Convert Word to PDF.

Catalytic, grab that correct action of create a PDF document.

And now we just have to configure our step.

So now to configure this, all we have to do is just tell it what file we want to convert to a PDF and then give that file a name.

So for the file, it’s not going to be a static one, this is going to be choose via field because it’ll just be the output of our generate word doc step.

So let’s go ahead and select that.

And then we can scroll down and find our generate for doc.

Now in case you’re wondering what the output of the steps name actually is, you can go ahead and expand the fields on the right side of that step.

So the outputs for generate word doc will be this file of generate word doc.

And this is a copy of all field reference as well.

And this works for all of your steps that have these outputs.

We’re just gonna go ahead and define what our new file name is.

I’m gonna keep things simple and just call it purchase order document.

And we’ll go ahead and save our step.

Okay, so the next step in our process is going to be sending that converted PDF for E signature.

So let’s just go ahead and add that step.

I’ll just say send for E signature.

And it looked like Catalytic just grabbed the default action of assigning a task to somebody, but that’s okay.

It gives us the opportunity to talk about how you can find all the other steps that are available.

If you go ahead and click on this drop down and then go to view all actions you’ll have a pop up appear, which will show you all the different actions that are available within Catalytic organized by these different buckets.

I’m just going to go ahead and search for signature at the top and we’ll find all of our E signature actions.

I’m gonna select the second option for sending a signature since that’s Catalytics default e signature action.

This will use Hello sign as the platform to capture the signature and we’re using Hello sign incense, it’s a technology that we baked into a platform so we can directly integrate with it.

Because Catalytic is platform agnostic, though, you can interact with any system that has an open API.

So you can accomplish the same functionality with Adobe or Docusign.

HelloSign is just a platform of choice.

One thing to note is that you can only find this action if you have premium actions enabled.

These are any actions that have a past few cost associated with it, feel free to read more about premium actions on our help site.

But just note that these actions aren’t enabled by default.

I’m just gonna go ahead and add this action though and to our Workflow.

Let’s go ahead and configure our E signature step.

Now, the file that we’re going to want to send is going to be the output of our Convert Word to PDF step.

So in case you need to double check what that is go ahead and expand that step on the right side in our field section, so you can see what the output is.

So here, it will be called purchase order document.

So I’m just gonna go ahead and select that field from our drop down.

Now let’s just go ahead and configure the rest of our step.

For the document title, I’m just gonna keep that the same, just for simplicity.

And for the email subject, we’re gonna go ahead and say, purchase order signature needed, already have the email message copied, so I’m just going to go ahead and paste that.

But we’re just saying, hey, this has been sent for a signature, use the link to sign it.

For the signer, one name, I’m gonna go ahead and use one of our global fields.

So the name that we have set up as our foreign field for our trigger, but instead of copying it from the global fields, I’m going to show you another way that you can go ahead and reference these.

So if you don’t want to go over here and copy and paste, what you can do is just start with the double curly bars.

And it’s gonna go ahead and show you all the different fields that you can now reference.

So I’ll just go ahead and type name, and we’ll see that our name field will pop up, we can click that.

And it’s the same as copying and pasting it here.

So in case you don’t want to go through the effort of navigating to the global fields every time.

For example, if you want that email address to be the one that we sent it to, I could just go ahead and do the double curly braces, type email and select it.

Let’s just go ahead and configure the rest of our step, I’m gonna keep the rest of the signers blank.

And all I’m gonna do is just fill out this last required field of the signed document name.

So we’re going to call this purchase order document.

But we’re going to say it has been signed.

Okay, we don’t have any dependencies or conditions.

So let’s just go ahead and save our step.

And that will be all we have to do to configure it.

Now that we’ve added all of our steps into our Workflow, let’s go ahead and start an instance by submitting a webform.

So I’m gonna navigate over to our web form, and I’m just gonna fill this out like I would if I was actually submitting a purchase order.

So let’s say we need new monitors three of them, and it’s gonna be $1,000.

Again, and we need those by, let’s say, the 17 networks.

So I’m just gonna go ahead and submit this.

And then I’ll navigate back into Catalytic follow this breadcrumb to our process page.

And we could see that we have a process that kicked off as soon as we submitted that webform.

Clicking into that instance, will bring us to our process run page where we can see what’s happening in real time with our Workflow.

So that Word document was generated converted to PDF.

And now it’s just waiting in my inbox for me to actually sign it.

So now I’m just gonna navigate over to my inbox, and we have an email that came in.

So it tell us that, hey, his signature is requested.

And here’s the body of our message that we built in our step, I’m gonna click on review and sign and then that’s gonna bring us to HelloSign, where we can actually sign this document.

So we could see the document that was generated with that information that I filled out.

Again, with those field references, just being replaced with the actual information that I inputted on that form.

I’m gonna go ahead and just sign this, this is the boring part, since this is outside of Catalytic, where I’m just doing this E signature.

And that is all I have to do as far as signing that.

So now back can Catalytic.

In a few moments, it’ll be notified that I signed it, and then our Workflow should be complete.

Alright, let’s navigate back over into our process page.

And I’m just going to go ahead and refresh this.

We could see where Workflows at and we can see that the entire thing has been completed.

I’m going to open up that sent for a signature step so we can see what actually comes back after we signed it.

So we have our actual signed document, which can now be pushed through Catalytic and different steps or different Workflows if you want.

And I’ll just go ahead and open that so we can see that document did get generated and signed and then pushed back into Catalytic.

This is again just a simple document generation process for a purchase order.

If you wanted you could build approval logics similar to the previous flows we built where maybe you have to have someone review the purchase order before it gets sent for a signature no next couple of videos we’re going to be going over processing data using Catalytic tables as our next core Workflow pattern thanks for tuning in