Question
Options for Generating a PDF with Specific Formatting
My client has requirements for the Pega application to generate a PDFs that look exactly like a specific controlled document within the company. My team has looked at the 'GeneratePDF' smart shape and the activity 'pyAttachPDF' but they don't seem like they are powerful enough to achieve very specific formatting.
Are there other tools OOTB that I should look at or what have other applications used to generate a PDF?
We had this requirement some years ago. We never found any suitable OOTB functionality, but that's not to say there isn't any there now. We developed a PRPC function to produce and format PDFs using the PD4ML code that ships with PRPC. This allows us to specify margins, headers, embedded pictures (company logos, etc.) and "wet-look" signatures, all of which are set as parameters (either using decision tables or other logic) to make it configurable.
On the plus side this gives us great flexibility, which sounds like the thing you're after. On the minus side it requires some dedicated code development to produce the function and a similar development effort to configure correspondence and other rules to allow for fully-flexible text. whether it is worth it or not depends on the importance of having these documents in a specific format.
You can build your custom HTML Markup as per your requirement and then pass that generated markup to htmltopdf activity which generate the pdf.
You can use the HTML rule to generate your markup as per each report you need.
thank you, I believe this activity will help use create a PDF with our specific format. My client does not want to purchase an outside software like 'PD4ML' to accomplish this task.
Check out this post for an example of using PD4ML in Pega. https://community1.pega.com/community/product-support/question/pdf-generation-pd4ml. You can experiment with a single java step in an activity, and refactor into a function rule later on.
We had a similar requirement where we want to generate PDF following specific format styling and also had a need to generate 1 single consolidated PDF containing all the attachments.
Our solution to the problem was addressed by using PD4ml Apis from a Pega function which were able to call by passing the Work Key.