My team uses GoCanvas apps with photos for field inspections. For legal reasons, a customers required us to remove photos showing issues requiring corrective action before we submit the inspection report to them. We updated the PDF designer to remove these photos for the customer, and my team scaled up our caption verbiage to better describe the location along with the corrective action.
Our operations crews could really use these photos for field service follow ups. I went into Canvas submissions and neither IE or Chrome would let me print the submission webpage (including photos) as a PDF. Long story short, we need a way to create two different PDFs - one with photos for internal use and one without these photos for distribution to our customer.
When I contacted GoCanvas technical support, Drew Leggett suggested I post this feature request here as perhaps there are others interested in this same feature or perhaps could offer us suggestions. I think of an app submission like a database entry with all the information included. This is separate from the PDF output which could be scaled up or down as necessary. In effect, the PDF output is a filtered view of the database information and - in our case - we would like the ability to create two different view filters going forward with customized layouts.
The more I think about it, this could be a great way to also customize the second output view to place disclaimers on it (for internal use only, &etc). Perhaps there are others out there who would want multiple outputs with different customer information and/or graphics. Thank you for taking the time to read my post.
-Ted Friedrichs
+1-619-438-9598 mobile
Comments
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Agreed. There needs to be a way to generate and send multiple PDFs for multiple audiences automatically upon submission.
If you only need 2 PDF outputs, you could:
- Use PDF Designer to create the one for your customers and only include the customer-facing fields
- Use the Standard PDF for internal use
The major drawbacks to this are:
- You don't get to customize the Standard PDF at all
- You can only automatically email one or the other, not both
If you need a more custom solution than that for 2 outputs, or if you need more than 2 outputs, today the only thing you can do is work with the Custom PDF team to create multiple PDFs, but there is no built-in / automatic way to send different outputs to different stakeholders upon submission.
You could potentially do some integrations via Zapier to one or more other services and try to approach this from that angle, but your experience could vary widely depending on a number of variables.
Here are a couple of other posts / feature requests that are similar if you wanted to view and / or vote any of them up:
https://help.gocanvas.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360000849248-Allow-default-PDF-output-per-user-or-per-group-per-app
https://help.gocanvas.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360020799233-Multiple-PDF-Templates-Email
https://help.gocanvas.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360028389333-Ability-to-Generate-Multiple-PDF-Documents-for-One-Submission
And here's another one:
https://help.gocanvas.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360016261293-Different-PDF-depending-on-criteria-in-the-app
Thanks for that round up of related requests, Nathan!
I think for this precise use case, Zapier is probably a good option. You could attach the photos to an email (similar to this: https://help.gocanvas.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360001676713--Can-submitted-photos-be-included-as-attachment-in-emails-?page=1#community_comment_360000590454). You could include all of the field data in the email template, so all the info would be there. If you absolutely need it as a PDF, you might be able to do that using Zapier's integration with Google Cloud Print.
But yes, this is a popular request :)