Advanced Use Cases

Exclude rows from the generator

There are many cases where you may want to exclude certain rows from your data source, which can be accomplished by adding a column called Exclude? (NOTE: it must be typed exactly like that - including the trailing '?' question mark).

Once you have your Exclude? column, put any value in that cell and the corresponding row will be skipped.

Grouping Data / Tables in the Template

You may encounter situations where you need one document to contain multiple rows of data from your data source.

Example : A contract for work to be performed at a facility. Your data source lists the name and ID of the technician and the items to be installed along with the price and installation date.

You can group data together into the same output document by prefixing the desired column headers with [G]. The Templated Document Generator will group together all rows where the columns marked with [G] have identical values.

In the Template you add the general contractual information, specifying the Place Holders using the double brackets ({{ and }}). The first row in the grouped data source will be used to populate this information.

Add a Table to the Template and fill out the Place Holders. The grouped data from the data source will be used to add additional rows to the Table, each containing the next row of data.

Example of Grouping Data

Above is a fictitious sample of a work order for a handy-man service. It lists out what will be done, how much each item costs, how many of each and the total price.

You will also notice that columns B and F have been prefixed with [G], indicating that the data is grouped by the Employee and the Site. In this specific case it will create two groups of data. While the employee is the same, the site changes, meaning the first four records will be grouped together and the bottom four will be grouped together.

Next, let's look at the Template for this data.

Inspecting the Template you will notice that we have placeholders both inside the table and outside the table.

Placeholders outside the table will be fed data from the first line in the data source, while the placeholders inside the table will have one row created for each row of data in that group.

Going back to the Sheets data source, let's configure the Templated Document Generator.

After selecting the Document Template, Document Output Folder and PDF Output Folder, hit the Refresh button to see the values populate correctly.

Here we have configured the Output Name to consist of the Company and the Site from the first row in the group.

When we generate the documents, we see the following outputs:

Fritello Karaton Campus, Bld. U.pdf

QualityComm 77 Abnormal St. #110.pdf

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