About Zapier Community
New to our Community? Get to know more about our space and how to make the most of your time here.

Code of Conduct Community FAQ's Zapier Common Questions What to Expect

Get Started With Zapier
New to Zapier? We have got you covered with our Zapier 101 Resources.

Zapier Essentials

Get Support
Have a question? Let's get you an answer!

How Do I...? Troubleshooting Code & Webhooks Developer Zone

Other Help Resources
Wait, there's more! Check out these Community sourced spaces for additional resources.

Zapier Help Center Hire an Expert

Zapier Reading
All of our best learning resources can be found here.

Featured Articles Show & Tell AI Hub Zapier Tools Hub

Learning Groups
Excited to meet other builders? Check out our interest areas full of doers, dreamers, and in-betweeners.

User Groups

Other Learning Resources
Some of our favorite additional ways to upskill your Zapier knowledge.

Zapier Learn Zapier Blog Zapier Webinars

Product Updates
Check out what is new and upcoming with Zapier with our regular product updates.

Product Updates

Early Access Program
Want to join Early Access? Learn more here.

Best answer

Best google forms - > pdf -> email solution?

  • 27 May 2020
  • 4 replies
  • 763 views
J

Collecting data on a google form. Need that to generate a doc from a template (ideally google docs), then send a pdf of that doc via email. Constraints:

  • google doc created needs strict permissions (not available to public via url)
  • pdf should not be saved at end of process

I’ve setup google doc template, and successfully merged rows from sheets w doc, which creates a doc file that is private.

Issues:

  • Cloud print even using same credentials can’t access the doc correctly and “prints” a login screen to pdf rather than the doc
  • convertapi returns “success” without any document payload
  • docmerge looks like it might work but is prohibitively priced
  • If I use the Drive app in zapier to adjust permissions on doc, I can’t change them back to private at end of zap
  • Even if I successfully cloud print the doc to pdf, it saves to root (ok - I can “move” it), and I can’t delete it after emailing it

So, any suggestions? Ideal would be solution that can convert private google doc file to pdf, but not save to docs. 

icon

Best answer by BowTieBots 29 May 2020, 17:50

View original
This post has been closed for comments. Please create a new post if you need help or have a question about this topic.

4 replies

Danvers
Userlevel 7
Badge +12

Hi @jgirard, that’s a really tricky one!

 

I’m not sure how you could do that with the constraints that you mentioned 🤔

 

I’m going to tag in a few of our Zapier experts to see if they have managed something similar: @Saastronomical, @BowTieBots, @ChrisP do you know of any apps that could help with the above workflow?

BowTieBots
Userlevel 4
Badge +4

Hi @jgirard,

 

All the solutions I know of from within Zapier requires you to change file permission to public.

 

In theory you could accomplish this with a google script that gets triggered by a webhook from Zapier.

Happy to give you my create pdf code script if your interested in trying to build out the workflow.  Basics would look like:

Trigger in Zapier → Create Doc from Template → Send Doc Id and email address to a GScript Webhook which:

  • Makes a pdf
  • Sends pdf to email address provided
  • Deletes pdf
Rich Schnitzel | Helping 6 figure entrepreneurs scale
andywingrave
Userlevel 7
Badge +9

Hello - for the first part, you’ll need a public link to do this with Google docs, sadly. If you need to create without this - And as you correctly pointed out, this will often be a paid for app. 

 

For the second part - Printing. You need to send the file, not the Google Docs link. This can be tricky, but basically what’s happening is there’s a conversion that Google does with the raw file to be able to print it in Google cloud. If you send Google cloud to the File URL it will need to log-in first. The way around this is to send the attachment to a Zapier Email and trigger based on the message received. 

 

For the third part - Is there anywhere you can move it to? Perhaps another drive. I see there’s no “Delete” with the Zapier <> Google Drive integration. If you can move to a secure folder, would that be good enough?

andywingrave
Userlevel 7
Badge +9

Great answer @BowTieBots ! A Google Script is a much better shout than using a paid service!

Terms & Conditions