7.4

l When the condition is false, it means that there is something in the Full Name field. In this case, we know that the form
was filled and submitted back to the process, and we handle the request as such.
l First, we add the full name, email and company information to job informations, in order for them to be available for the
rest of the process.
l Then, we have a small condition that verifies if the user checked the "Newsletter"box. If so, the conditional branch is
triggered. Note that this condition is put inside its own branch because otherwise, the rest of the process would not run
when the newsletter is selected. Since we want both to happen, the branch is there with a "stub"if the condition is false.
PDF Workflow
A PDFworkflow, in essence, is one that does not contain any PlanetPress Design document and only uses PDFfiles as data
files. In most cases, this also implies the use of Metadata, as Metadata is used to establish boundaries between document, sort
and sequence (split)the PDF data into different parts.
The idea is that a PDFfile, because it is a formatted document in and of itself, doesn't absolutely need to go through Plan-
etPress Design to be processed and printed. Additionally, because of the PDFtools in PlanetPress Office and PlanetPress Pro-
duction, you can easily merge, split, print and take parts of the PDFfile as required.
Because we are using Metadata, however, here are a few ground rules to keep in mind while working with such workflows
(these rules also apply to Metadata use in general):
l Modifying Metadata does not immediately modify the data. This is one of the benefits of Metadata because
you can sort it, filter it, sequence it, add data to it, without ever modifying the data file itself. This is important because if
you, for instance, filter out certain data pages from the metadata and then save your data file with the Send to Folder
task, the full data file is saved, not the filtered one. This is resolved through different methods, used in the different
examples below.
l Modifying data does not immediately modify the Metadata. So, if you have a PDFfile with metadata and
you use a PDFsplitter, the metadata information would still reflect the original data, not the split. This can generally be
resolved by using the Create Metadata plugin again.
l Branches, Loops and Conditions do not reset the metadata. This is important in some cases because the
metadata does affect your output (see next point)and can cause confusion if not handled properly. For example, if you
were to split a data file and, under a specific condition, create metadata on the file and generate a PDF, other wise print
the file, you would run into this issue. When the metadata is created in the condition, it stays "active"even on the next
split. If that split actually prints, it's using the metadata from the previous split, and will attempt to print the number of
pages specified in the metadata. So, it may print 3 pages instead of 40, or 25 pages, the last 5 of which would be blank.
The only way to get around this is to either regenerate your metadata when possible, or to use the Metadata File Man-
agement to delete the active metadata file. When doing this, metadata is ignored so the data file itself properly deter-
mines the number of pages to print.
l As a general rule, Only Input Tasks and Metadata-Related tasks modify Metadata. There are, however, a
few notable exceptions:
l Create PDF has the option to reset your metadata according to the new PDFfile. In reality, Create PDF is one of
the most useful tasks in PDF workflows, since it is the easiest way to make your PDFfile conform to the meta-
data without using a PlanetPress Design document. See the Create PDF page for more information.
l Run Script tasks can also modify metadata using the Metadata API(see Using Scripts).
l The Barcode Scan task can add information to the existing metadata, and creates it if there is none.
l The Capture Fields Generator, Capture Fields Processor, Get Capture Document and Find Capture Documents
tasks generate their own metadata.
l The Lookup in Microsoft® Excel® Documents enhances metadata fields with information from an Excel spread-
sheet, but does not otherwise change its structure.
Special Workflow Types