Design branded documents with DronaHQ PDF Generator

DronaHQ is set on its journey to give developers an easy way to build mobile and web applications. And ever since that launch of our low code platform, we learned that a good majority of the apps that customers were building on top of our platform involved some form of document generation – invoices, summary reports, and quotations to name a few. And customers even found ways to plug in external tools to generate their reports.

Once the app is built, be it for data collection, inspection, order placement, invoice generation, or a dashboard that integrates with other apps, the next step is usually to send a concise report to the stakeholders. The traditional approach would be to manually feed some key information into a document and print it out or send an email or connect to a third-party system to dynamically generate these reports. This approach can be time-consuming and connecting to third-party tools can bear additional costs. 

That is why today, we are launching DronaHQ’s PDF Generator – a tool that will enable customers to generate PDF documents for invoices, reports, contracts, and much more. 

A complete toolkit

PDF documents are a crucial part of any business operation. Our customers have often voiced how they needed a way to put the data fetched in the apps they build on DronaHQ to be put into a shareable format and sent it as, say, an attachment over an email. 

Though there are plenty of refined PDF generator tools in the market, adding this capability to our toolkit is a natural product extension for us. We wanted our customers to achieve this functionality without having to leave the DronaHQ ecosystem. 

With DronaHQ’s PDF generator tool, businesses can easily create and customize PDF documents. The tool is user-friendly and provides a range of templates to choose from, making it easy to create professional-looking documents in just a few clicks. Businesses can also customize the templates according to their specific needs, adding their logo, changing colors, layouts, and more.

We use the term ‘complete toolkit’ and ‘ecosystem’ because that’s what we’ve created. With DronaHQ app builder, users get the capability to connect to any data source and design personalized user interfaces. And advanced capabilities such as Actionflows are a powerhouse of tasks such as JavaScript block or HTML that gives you control over the data being fed to the PDF tool. 

Transform with JavaScript: Say you fetched some data from your APIs or used the app to capture data. Using JavaScript you can completely transform and play with the data that is being fed to the PDF generator.

Statics and Dynamic data population: The PDF creator supports both static and dynamic data populations using variables. The PDF would automatically add rows to populate as much data you send to it, say when creating a list of articles purchased to an invoice.

Organize or reorder PDF templates: While the PDF creator sports pre-built functionality for page data organization, customers can also take it up a notch to design professional-grade documents. Say the dynamic data population overflows to the next page in a way that leaves the heading on page 1 and the following text on page 2, using custom HTML scripts you can define the logic that ensures the entire text block be populated on a new page if it breaks in such a way. 

With customizations like these, the limitation to build versatile PDF documents gets lifted. 

A great example of where the PDF creator can come in handy is for Invoice Generation. For instances like order collection or bill clearance, you would like to send an invoice to your customer. In the PDF creator, you can lay down the template, the tables, and the branding, along with the variable fields that will hold the order details like the customer name, order quantity, and total price. Upon the trigger of a workflow, the variable fields in the PDF will get populated just like your database would. You can then send this invoice automatically to your customer’s inbox.

Customers using the PDF generator

In a recent example, a customer working in the landscape restoration industry was building a site inspection toolkit on the platform. Answer to which would lead to new blocks of questions opening up. For example, if the inspector marks that a water outlet is present on the premises, that would dynamically open a set of new questions, and the same process would follow. So, by the end of the inspection, there is no knowing how many questions would have been answered. They were able to generate PDF reports for the inspections ensuring that the file dynamically adds new rows for every new question answered by the inspector.

And at DronaHQ, we ourselves use the PDF generator to automatically generate invoices for our financial transactions and send them to the intended stakeholders over an email. 

The PDF generator is quick to interpret and create PDFs with. 

How the PDF document generator works

The PDF generator is composed of a PDF builder, pre-defined designing components, and a set of ready-to-use PDF templates.

The steps with DronaHQ‘s PDF Creator are simple:

1. Create a template – add, edit, duplicate, or delete input fields and tables, visual elements.

2. Set up automatic PDF generation – map out the pdf variables to be populated from your application.

3. Get the document – receive the PDF document that can be stored on your device or emailed to the stakeholders, upload it to Google Drive, send it as an attachment on Slack, or Trello, and Print it.

Create stunning PDF reports with DronaHQ

The PDF generator tool is a valuable addition to the platform, providing businesses with an easy way to generate professional-looking documents quickly and efficiently. 

To help you trial out the PDF creator, we’ve got 25 free tasks (25 PDFs per month) added to every plan. If you’re interested in learning more about DronaHQ’s PDF generator tool, you can head over to your DronaHQ accounts and enable the trial. The limit resets every month. You can add more tasks to your plan by purchasing the add-on plan as per your use case. 

Get started here.