8.4

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 Connect 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 PlanetPress Connect to be processed and printed. Additionally, because of the PDFtools in
PlanetPress Workflow, 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 Management" on page 397 to delete the active metadata file. When doing this,
metadata is ignored so the data file itself properly determines 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: