Nintex Workflow/Forms to PDF
Thanks for reading (viewing) this post. This is about taking a Nintex Forms instance that someone has filled in, and using Nintex Workflow to convert it to a PDF form. Now this is a workaround and not an official Nintex Forms to PDF converter. But hopefully, it will give you an idea of how to take your form data and make it into a PDF that you can store in a Document Library or email it etc.
This process works around two main piece of technology.
1. a Word document that has Content Controls on it
2. the Nintex Workflow Convert Document action, that uses Word Automation Services, to convert the word document to PDF
The Workflow itself is not very complex. There are about 7 actions in it. All it’s doing, is creating a couple of text variable to store the temporary Word Document and also the PDF. Then, since one of my controls on my form is not linked to any field on the list, I need a Query XML action to pull the value out of it. Once we have that, we use the Update Document action to create an instance of our document template and we update all the Content Controls on that document. This action will create the Word Document in our library.
The 2nd last action is the Convert Document action which will take the newly created Word document and convert it to PDF.
The final action is a Delete Item, which will delete the Word document, since we don’t need it.
Here’s what the workflow looks like :
Quite a simple workflow. Potentially, your workflow could be more complex. But if you’re simply updating some controls on a document, that is all you’ll need.
The Nintex Forms looks like this :
Granted, it’s not the prettiest form. But it was a quick one to show you how to convert this into a PDF.
