Workflows

What are workflows any way

Workflows are nothing but a set of Activities that need to be executed in a predefined sequence to complete a process.In our example you may imagine defining a workflow as Generating a Pixel perfect Invoice or any PDF ,sending an email , or sending your data to another system when someone submits a form.

Show me how to create a Workflow

After you install the add-on click on "Setup Workflows" that will launch your Workflow window.From the workflow window you can create a workflow by clicking on "Create Workflow"

What Activities can I create Now

At this point a single activity  (Export Activity) can be created per workflow .The activity can help you generate pixel perfect PDFs that may include Invoices ,News Letters  or any professional PDFs.

How does Export Activity work

The idea is first you define a Template in a Google Doc .Any dynamic parameters can be replaced through a set of expressions supported by Form Notify.

As a second step find out in which folder you want to create the PDFs when some one submits a form and create a folder accordingly. As a best practice you may create the Template and the outputs in separate folders under a single parent folder.

    From the add-on workflow create screen give a name to your workflow and continue to Activities tab.Here you can configure several things for your Export Activity.

You can select the Template and the output folder you created in the above steps.

You can create a subfolder or leave it blank .If you want to create a subfolder per form ,you can use an expression like {{Form Name}} for this field .

         The generated PDF will have the name given in this Field .You can use expressions in this Field. To make files unique you may use something like {{Form Name}}-{{Response Id} } or you may use {{Form Name}} {{Some unique dynamic expression such as email id}}.

Please make yourself comfortable on how file sharing works on google .You can find more information here .

        We support most of the file sharing options.

Once you configure your workflow and save it ,the workflow will execute automatically next a time a form response comes.

      You can test your workflow execution from "Replay Past responses" menu .Open the same form from another tab and if you do not have past responses create a dummy form response by heading to Google form preview and submitting a response.

From the add-on menu head to "Replay Past Responses" and replay one of the response.If everything goes well it will generate your required PDF file in the configured output folder with the given sharing options. Verify that everything is working and modify your workflow based on your requirement.

Embed Dynamic Image

Some times you may have a requirement to embed an image uploaded by the form respondents dynamically .You can follow the below instructions to achieve the same.

Folder Permission : 

When you set up a File Upload Question in Google form .You have to change the Folder (The folder where uploaded images are being Stored) permission to "Anyone with the link"  and only Viewer .This is required and without this the Add-on can't read the uploaded files .

Embed Image Tag:

The Tag syntax is as below 

{{ Embed Image , form field name /http image url , optional width , optional height}}


Some Examples

{{ Embed Image , image }} -In this example the Bold "image" is the form Field question name for File Upload


{{ Embed Image, https://i.imgur.com/VW8rUE7.png , 60,70}} - If you want to embed a static public image you can do so , 60 indicates image width and 70 indicates image height


{{ Embed Image , image ,  ,250 }} --If you do not want width and only want to adjust height then leave the width blank


Embed Image Tag In separate Paragraph:

This expression needs to be in a separate paragraph or inside a single table cell .

Pause Workflow

You can pause a workflow from the workflow main page .You can also delete a work flow.

Track Generated Documents

If the form has a google sheet for responses , the same sheet will be updated with a document link against each response.

We are super excited to introduce this new concept and will be adding many more features under the workflow in future.Please reach out to us in case you need further info.