Automatically generate Word document from template

Templating syntax

When creating your own templates, mind the templating language. Plumsail Word DOCX templates use a different approach than most other templating solutions. It uses a minimum of syntax to make your work done.

To learn more about the templating engine, check out the documentation article.

In short, the templating engine thinks that everything between such curly {{ }} brackets is variables where it will apply your specified data. In our case the most basic example would be {{invoiceNumber}} and {{date}} tags. They let the engine know that we want to render the invoice number and its date.

But, of course, we can implement a more complex scenario. In our template, we refer to properties inside a collection of products. For that, we use nested tags with a dot operator:

• The {{product.name}}, {{product.price}} tags get the name, description, and price properties in the product’s object.

The templating engine is smart enough to identify what content to duplicate. It will iterate through all objects in the array to render them and add rows automatically.

You can learn more about table rendering in the tables section of the documentation.

Test template

To check how the document will look at the end, click on the Test template button. You will see the dialog where you can fill in the auto-generated testing form. Form fields are created from tokens of your document template. You can adjust the look of the testing form by changing token types.

Click on the ‘Create document’, and the resulting invoice will appeat in a new tab. Once you’re satisfied with it, press Save&Next to proceed further - to the Settings substep.

Here you set the following parameters. Descriptions are under the picture.

Template mode

It is Testing by default. It means you won’t be charged for this process runs, but result documents will have a Plumsail watermark. Change it to Active to remove the watermark.

Output filename

Use tokens to make it personalized. They work the same way as in the template. For instance, we use the following tokens to define the output file name - {{invoiceNumber}}. As a result, we’ll receive an invoice marked with its number - Invoice 432.

Output type

By default, it is the same as your template’s format. In this particular case, it’s DOCX. And we kept it to create the DOCX Word document from a template.

Test template

Once you’ve customized all the settings, you can test the template to see the result as we did it before.

When everything is done here, click on Save & Next to set up deliveries.