In our current project we need the ability to save a report to the database.
Because of the sensitive medicale data that we are processing we need to clean our database as soon as possible. After a client has filled a questionaire we need to generate a PDF with the provided answers. We offer this PDF as download for the client and later on need to move that PDF to a document management system.
We have been told that the only way currently available is to build a API endpoint that generates the report and call upon that API endpoint so we can store the generated PDF into the database. This feels like a suboptimal approach with the potentiel that we’re exposing and endpoint that has access to sensitive data.
Having the ability to generate a report and store that report into the database directly would be very benificial to our processes and I can imagine helpfull for others as well.
You probably have already looked further into this than the text in your question goes.
Does the ‘literal’ PDF file need to be saved, or can a precursor to the PDF be saved?
Depending on the reporting tool, reports can be generated as either PDF or a range of other file formats. XML/HTML, in my experience, is easier to handle than PDF data.
XML can be the source for the PDF for the client as well as it could be the data that is saved to the document management system.
An example toolchain, not via SQL server, can be found at https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1144874/any-good-xslt-sheets-for-xml-to-pdf
Hi Bas,
Generating reports and emailing or saving them to the database using system flows is planned for the 2021.2 release, scheduled for April.
The Generate report process action will output binary data. This data can then be saved to any of the supported file storage types using an enhanced version of the Write file connector.
Edit: AWS S3 is not mentioned in the docs but it is supported! We'll fix this asap.