PDF Form Filling, XML & RPA Integration

How to create reader-friendly PDF documents from XML or JSON data–automatically!

This demo also shows how to harness the efficiency of Robotic Process Automation (RPA), powered by our partners at AstroRPA, to take a tedious multi-step work routine and turn it into a hands-off process completed in a fraction of the time.

In this scenario, our user receives survey responses in the form of XML data attached to an email. For the purposes of making the information easily readable to the average person, they would like to fill that data into actual forms and store those PDFs in their document management system for viewing later. This allows them to view both electronic and paper responses in a human-readable format in the same repository.

SimpleIndex can read data from XML, JSON, or simple table formats like CSV or Excel, into fillable PDF forms. But there’s some prep work that must be done because the XML data arrives in a single file, but SimpleIndex needs individual XML and PDF files for each survey to generate the documents.

In our scenario, the user has to carry out the following steps:

Move the XML attachment from email to a folder
Open the XML and copy each survey results block to its own individual XML file
Save those individual XML files to the “Input” folder of the SimpleIndex job
Copy one blank PDF form for each XML file to the “Input” folder
Name each blank PDF form with the same name as the XML file e.g. “Patient-001.xml” and “Patient-001.pdf”
Run the SimpleIndex job to create the filled-in PDF forms

Using AstroRPA, we can create a robot that performs all these steps while the user goes for a cup of coffee ? Is there truly a time savings? Watch the video to see both the user and the robot (hint: the robot is about 9 times more efficient ?).

^{Automated XML to Forms with SimpleIndex and AstroRPA}

Many document processes require you to prepare documents for processing, such as downloading docs and data files from a website or third party app, splitting and sorting the files, etc.. After processing, they often need to be uploaded to another website or third-party app along with the required metadata. Using RPA, you can fully integrate these steps into a single automated workflow no matter what applications or websites are used, without any API integrations or custom coding.