In the Geocortex Workflow 5.18, we’ve added the Run Print activity, which allows the user to run a print template that they’ve created inside of Geocortex Printing and then run it inside their Geocortex Workflow.
The user can then bring in that flexibility of Geocortex Workflow and customize the experience of creating a print template.
You can use the wide variety of out-of-the-box tools that Workflow provides and use the use those to your advantage when creating a print template.
Watch how this works in action in today’s Geocortex Tech Tip!
Video Transcript
“Hi, it’s Paul Van Haaren, I’m the Technical Sales Manager here at VertiGIS.
Today, we are going to have a look at how you can use Geocortex Workflow to run the print templates that you’ve designed inside of Geocortex Printing. Let’s have a look!
OK, so here we are inside of Geocortex Workflow Designer.
Here’s the activity we will be talking about here today, which is the Run Print activity. This is a new activity that we’ve added inside of Geocortex Workflow that basically allows the user to run a print template that they’ve created inside of Geocortex Printing, and run it inside of your Geocortex Workflow.
So, it really allows the user to bring in that flexibility of your Geocortex Workflow and customize the experience of creating a print template.
For example, you can have a workflow set, some visibilities of features through a custom query or display some mark up on the map that’s highlighting a specific area or showing measurement value. You can use the wide variety of out-of-the-box tools that Workflow provides and use the use those to your advantage when creating a print template.
When I highlight the Run Print activity here in the designer interface, I’m presented with some inputs here on the right; the first one being the URL of the print template item. So, when you create a print template into your text printing, it creates an item, and this is the URL to that item and this is what will run when you run the print template itself.
We’ve also got some other inputs, so we’ve got an extent, scale and parameters. I’m going to take a closer look at these other inputs using the help documentation here.
When I open this up, we can see that the inputs are listed here, so we’ve talked about the URL. The extent itself, if you leave the field blank, it will use its current extent, so it’ll just leave whatever current extent you’re on. We’ll use that when you generate a template.
If you wanted something a little bit different, a custom extender, a sort of more static extent that you always want the print template set to, you can enter in a geometry, your desired geometry there.
Same thing with scale. If you want it to always print at a specific scale, you can enter just a string value for the scale.
In Parameters is where kind of the power of workflow is brought in here. You can see that inside of a print template, you’ve got parameters that you can set. I’m going to go over to your Geocortex Printing here and show you those parameters that you can configure.
I’ve got a few here. Title and notes are defaults, and I’ve also added a name one here as well. I’ll show you why that’s there in a minute here.
In the example, just to give you an example here, so we’ve got two methods of populating these parameters when the workflow is run, with the first year being Notes. So, when the workflow is run, the users are presented with a text box that it’s a notes field and that form field happens to be form1, called ‘textarea1’. And what that means is whatever the user enters in that field will then be populated in in that field, in the print template itself. So that’s a dynamically populated field there.
You can also set a static title. If you always wanted the title to be ‘flooded areas’, you just simply put the title in quotes here and always have that title. But you could have it the same as here, you could have a different form element display of the title dynamically, and you’ll see that again in a minute.
This workflow is very simple, but I wanted to show you just a basic example to begin with. The output of this print, you can see is a href value. So, it’s essentially a URL that’s generated.
The display form just simply needs to display that URL for the user to click on.
If I jump into this text here, text form element, you can see that I just simply have just an expression here to display ‘Click to Download’. That’s going to be the text displayed, and then I’m just referencing the runPrint1, the href value that’s generated from the print. Very simple. It just simply displays the link inside of the form.
If I wanted to look at something a little bit more useful, I guess, and use the power of Workflow, like I mentioned before, I can add it into a more dynamic workflow that that does something a little bit more interesting.
This is a demographics workflow that’s been constructed, and what I’ve done is actually added in a print option here at the end of the workflow. So, I’ve done some actions here throughout the workflow and then at the end I’m presented with a print button.
You can see here at the bottom there is button now to print.
In this value here, so this is the print path that I’ll take here, and here’s where we can enter in a title and notes that I’ve added in here.
There’s one other parameter that I’m going to show you here in the print job. And that’s that name value that I referred to before inside of that Geocortex Printing template.
So, we’ve got our notes that are referencing the form value in the display form that I just showed you.
We’ve also got a name value that’s actually from near the start of the workflow, and I’ll show you that here in a second, and then we’ve got a title that also is being pulled from that form.
So, we’ve got a couple of, we’ve got the title and notes coming from this display form, but we’ve got that name value coming from way up here at this value here. So, whatever the user enters in for the name, it will then be displayed in our print template all the way down here.
All right, so let’s just have a go ahead and have a look at an application to run this workflow, in this case, it’s a Web AppBuilder application. We’re going to kick off the workflow over here. This workflow just simply presents the user with some demographic information about the selected site.
Remember, this is the name field that’s going to be populated in my print template here.
Next, we’ll do a simple drivetime analysis or buffer in this case. And that’s going to present some demographic information.
Now we’ve got a print button here at the bottom, and this is where I can enter my title site, for site A, let’s say, and then you could say these are some notes about this site and then we go ahead and submit that.
Okay, great. So, we’ve got our download here we can click on to view the print template itself, and then we can see that the information for the title is here, Demographics for Site A we’ve got our notes here on the bottom right.
These are some notes about the site, and, of course, we’ve got our name that’s been pulled in from that first form as well.
Hopefully this has given you an idea of how your Geocortex Workflow can be used to sort of customize the experience even further with your Geocortex Printing and hopefully that will be useful for you in the future.
Have yourself a good day!”
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