More often than not professionals and companies need to generate batches of documents out from a document template and a given data source. Although it was possible to do so with older versions of Docxpresso, that required the participation of specialized IT personnel. Although straightforward, the process required first fetching the data, processing it and forwarding it to a Docxpresso instance with the help of the Docxpresso SDK (or even using directly the Docxpresso API Core for programmers).
Even though if in some complex cases such procedure may still be necessary there are many other simpler cases, where data may be directly available in CSV or TXT format, for which a more direct approach for users without specific technical skills may be provided.
Docxpresso now incorporates out of the box the possibility of creating batches of documents out of a Docxpresso template (just a Word document uploaded to the Docxpresso platform) and a CSV or TXT file. The integrated new functionality goes even further allowing for the merge of external documents that may be annexed in a custom fashion to each generated document.
Let us explain this last point using an illustrative example. Imagine that the document to be generated incorporates the data of an employee and that final document should include some complementary info like her/his legal certificate of residence. Rather than first generating the document and manually attaching the corresponding certificate to every single final document, we may include in the CSV or TXT file the name of the documents to be attached. By uploading separately to Docxpresso a zip file with all the required annexed documents Docxpresso will automatically do the merging process for us.
The general procedure to generate a document batch is very simple:
- Select a template from the Docxpresso repository.
- Include some information that may help to uniquely identify the resulting batch of documents and select the final format of the document batch (PDF, Word or Open Document).
- Upload the CSV or TXT file with all the required data:
First row: the name of the variable to be replaced.
Additional rows: the data to be inserted in each document (one row per document) with the corresponding variable values (for images or scanned signatures we may include a URL).
- Upload the zip with the attachments if needed.
- Test the batch job with the provided data of your choice (optional but recommended).
- Launch the batch job.
Afterwards you are directed to the batch job download page where you can follow the progess of the process (the process for small batches may be very fast and you may get the results in real time) or simply forget it and come back later.
Once the batch job is completed you may:
- Download each individual document
- Download a zip file with the whole batch of documents
- Edit any particular document in order to modify or complete the previously provided data loaded via the CSV or TXT file.
- Redownload the data in Excel format incorporating any modification manually included in any of the documents.
- Declare each batch document as revised (optional).
We hope that you find this new functionality of interest.
