PDF Attachment Send as Attachment

I am developing a prototype for an Accountancy firm where they want to offer a very simple alternative to their current spreadsheets to their (typically) sole traders. TBH I’ve advised them to look at something like receipt bank but they don’t want to use this as they want a custom app where they can log in to the back end and download all their client’s data and upload it to their bookkeeping systems. Being accountants they want to limit run costs😄 so if I can avoid using an integration platform (such as Zapier) would be great. I’ve two queries

NO 1. Using the existing PDF component * is it possible when their client creates a simple invoice to email this an attachment to their client or worst case is it possible to email a link to the PDF

NO 2. This one is a real S T R E T C H … anybody did any integration with Machine Learning tools whereby when their client scans a purchase receipt it might be able to (attempt) to populate certain fields based on the receipt

Appreciate any advice or stories of success/failure

thank You
Noel

PDF component*= (which I believe is in Alpha and is being re designed (not sure when ?)

Hey Noel,

While we don’t yet have the functionality to directly attach a generated PDF, we can kinda of hack it with the following process…

With PDF’s, if you generate a PDF and look at the URL you’ll see something like this…

https://timyoung.tadabase.io/app/AXQvPZnrLY/pages/eykNOvrDY3-o6WQb5NnBZ.pdf

Let’s highlight a section of this URL:

pages/eykNOvrDY3-o6WQb5NnBZ.pdf

eykNOvrDY3 is the table ID where PDF’s are stored, o6WQb5NnBZ is the record ID of the parent record for this PDF. For example, if you had a PDF on a Project details page, this record ID would be for the Project

This part of the URL is static for every PDF:

https://timyoung.tadabase.io/app/AXQvPZnrLY/pages/eykNOvrDY3-

This means that if we have a record ID stored in a field, we can use a text formula field to concatenate the static part of the URL + the record ID + .pdf

Here’s a video of an example to describe this a bit better.





For your second question, you could try using our Taggun Receipt Parser pipe. It uses this receipt scanning API to do this. https://www.taggun.io/

3 Likes

wow ! very exciting :astonished:

Finally got around to testing TAG GUN … wondering how to approach this in tadabase.
The objective is to scan a receipt and add the Merchant name and amount to the database.
Thinking I need a two-step form (if they exist in TD)
STEP 1. User opens ADD RECEIPT FORM
The form asks a user to scan the receipt, the user scans the receipt and presses submit.
Image is submitted to TAGGUN via PIPE and TAGGUN returns values and populates a field in my table
STEP 2 of the form presents the record for updates with scanned values and allows the user to edit or correct and then Save.
Does this seem like the simplest/ best way to do this ?

After the image is scanned I need to somehow get the URL of the Image as that has to be submitted to TAGGUN … any clues on how to do that (I’ll try to figure out in the meantime and post here if I do)

Any and all advice appreciated tks Noel

Actually, I note that TAGGUN pipe only returns Total Amount (Number) .
It does not return any other data such as merchant name or TAX etc :grimacing:

Any way you guys could add a few more fields ? tks Noel

:flushed: Oops this thread is beginning to feel like one of that nocode BUILD IN PUBLIC challenges :smile: I just figured out I can add parameters myself

I have played around with various pipes and got them to work and I tested the tag gun pipe and it works in test mode.
I created a two-step form and step one scans the image and record rules are supposed to populate a field with the URL of the image so I can submit it to TAG GUN in step 2. I followed this post Creating a pipe to get the URL of image fields but I can not get it to insert ANYTHING into the URL field. So on step 2 the URL field is still blank so I have nothing to submit to TAG GUN. I tried formatting the IMAGE URL field as a Link and also tried text. but neither helped. I tested a simple record rule update the URL with the custom text “Hello World” and that worked. I also tried a simpler pipe but to no avail, so whatever I am doing with the pipe is not working. :weary:

My PDF url looks like this

/app/6WQbxLnrnB/pages/VX9QoerwYv.pdf

Why don’t I see the same format as you mention?

Hey @centellix,

That looks like the URL structure for the Builder. Can you please try generating a PDF from the Live App and check that URL structure to match?

That actually is from the app (edited). Clicked the PDF button and thats the URL I see

Is there a PDF being generated and displayed? Is the PDF created on a parent page?

Yes, a PDF is being generated just fine. Yes, its on a parent page. Also, once its generated, not sure if this is normal, but after attempting to copy that URL and load it again, it says You don’t have permission to access this page.

PDFs on parent pages is pretty buggy unfortunately but that’s why your URL looks different. Using the example from above, where the PDF page is created on a details page:

…app/AXQvPZnrLY/pages/pdfID-recordID.pdf

Should I not be creating PDFs from a parent page then?

At this time, it’s not recommended.

A major bug for me is when I edit any component on the page where the PDF button is, the PDF layout clears all settings. Its very frustrating and it would be nice to have this bug fixed. My work-around is that when I do have to save any changes on my page where my PDF button is, I keep another tab open where I define all my PDF settings. When it clears, I just go into the PDF layout, edit any field in there, then click save and close. It will restore the settings again.

So the only way to retrieve the PDF that is generated is by having the PDF on a page other than the parent?