Use Airtable
Introduction
It’s quite easy to start using the Plumsail Documents extension for Airtable:
Set up a document generation process.
Connect the Plumsail extension to your Airtable workspace.
Once everything is set up, select the base records you want to generate documents for and use the Plumsail extension to generate documents automatically.
That’s it! We’ll review each of the steps in more detail further in the article.
Set up a document generation process
Check the article on how to create a new process.
For demonstration purposes, we created an Airtable database Client orders based on the Product catalog template.
Additionally, we established a Documents process to create invoices from an Airtable documents template.
To use the Airtable template start with creating a process from template:
Then search for the Airtable template:
Name the process and proceed to the settings:
Further information on changing the default template can be found later in the article.
Working with Documents extension
Let’s explore how to use the Airtable extension.
How to add a button and choose a process to run
Note
Currently, the extension doesn’t support Plumsail Accounts with two-factor authentication and Plumsail Teams. It is coming with the next releases.
First, connect the Plumsail Documents extension.
Open your Airtable database and click Add an extension button.
Type Plumsail in the search field and click Add button when the extension is found.
3. Then Sign up for Plumsail Account if you don’t have an account already and click Connect. You’ll need to enter your Plumsail account email and the password to complete the connection.
After connecting to the Plumsail account you’ll see a dialog with details to add a document generation button. Let’s check the settings:
Process to start. Dropdown menu with all available processes from the account. Select the process you want to use to generate the document.
Button title. The button title is pre-filled with the name of the selected process, but you can change it.
Multiple records. When you select multiple records, you can either generate a document for each record or generate one aggregated document with all records.
Result document. This is how you receive the result document. You have two options: download the document and/or attach it to the record. Additionally, select a field to attach the document.
Field to store attachment. Select a field from the database to store the generated document.
Note
Please check out the article on how to add an attachment field to your Airtable database.
You can add several buttons to the same database and link them to different processes. All Airtable users who have access to the database will see the added buttons.
If you click Add button and close the settings, you’ll see that a button is added to the extension window.
How to copy tokens and add them into the template
Let’s go back to our document generation process now.
We created a process using the default Airtable template. You can add some tokens to the template to correspond with your database fields.
Open your Documents settings.
And open the template for editing.
Then go to the Airtable database and click on the gear button to open the extension settings.
Open the list of the tokens by clicking on the Show template tokens button.
You’ll see all available tokens from the database. Copy the token you want to display in the generated document.
Let’s now take a look at how to change the default Airtable template to display some additional information from the database.
Create template
Go back to the documents template and add the tokens you want to display.
For example, we want to add pictures to the Product column cell:
Go to the extension settings, select the database Client orders and click on the Show template tokens button as described above.
Find the image URL token using the path: Order line items -> Image -> Value -> thumbnails -> small -> url.
Paste the copied token to the Product column cell.
Add the picture formatter to dynamically insert pictures into the DOCX template.
Results
Completing the process settings we choose PDF as the output for the result file.
Now, we can close the extension settings and generate an invoice.
The resulting document is downloaded and attached to the record.
