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  • How do I dynamically populate bulleted deliverables and sub-items in PandaDoc via Zapier?

Hello everyone, 

I’m hoping that someone can offer some suggestions on how to address a problem I am attempting to solve. Here is what I am trying to accomplish: 

 

My project is to generate a Statement of Work for e-signature. So far I have built an automation which:

 

  1. Sends data to Zapier via an HTTP Callout from a Salesforce Flow.
  2. The raw JSON data is then parsed via a Zapier code step into individual fields
  3. Specific portions of the raw JSON data is parsed via a Zapier code step into a set of line items.
  4. A PandaDoc is created from a template which uses data from step # 2 to fill in document variables, and uses data from Step 3 to populate a pricing table.

Up to this point, everything works swimmingly. It’s the last bit that I am really struggling to solve for. The requirement for this piece is: 

The data coming from Salesforce consists of anywhere from 1 - 10 different deliverables (each of which is already listed in the pricing table in step 4), and each of these deliverables can have anywhere from 1 - 20 sub-items that make up the work that will be done as a part of those deliverables. I have a requirement to also include in the statement of work a list of the deliverables and their related sub-items along with estimated delivery dates. An example of how these items should appear is shown below

 

 

Deliverable 1

  • D1 subitem 1 - XX/XX/XXXX
  • D1 subitem 2 - XX/XX/XXXX
  • D1 subitem 3 - XX/XX/XXXX

Deliverable 2 

  • D2 subitem 1 - XX/XX/XXXX
  • D2 subitem 2 - XX/XX/XXXX
  • D2 subitem 3 - XX/XX/XXXX
  • D2 subitem 4 - XX/XX/XXXX

 

Because the number of deliverables and sub-items per deliverable is variable from one Statement of Work to the next, I’m finding it really difficult to wrap my head around how to generate the sub-items as shown.

 

If I were to use PandaDoc and just used variables for these items, how do I ensure that the sub-items are bulleted properly? 

 

I’ve considered trying to generate the deliverable sub-item list as a separate document which could then be attached to the PandaDoc Statement of Work, but am unclear what other apps would best faciliate this. 

 

Has anyone ever done something like this in the past and/or have any suggestions as to how to best approach this? 

 

Hi @az_automation_guy, welcome to the Community! 🎉 

Does PandaDoc accept HTML or Markdown formatting? If so, perhaps you could use a Code by Zapier action to convert the desired line item values into bulleted lists which you can select in the PandaDoc action.

If you’re not familiar with writing Javascript or Python code we have a Code with AI feature that can help generate the necessary code for you. You can learn more about that here: Generate a Code step using AI (Beta)


Hope that helps to get you pointed in the right direction. If I’ve misunderstood what you’re after here or you run into any trouble on that do let us know!

Unfortunately PandaDoc does not accept HTML/Markdown :(

 

Ultimately what I ended up doing here was:

  1. Created a visualforce page within Salesforce with the formatting I wanted and rendered that page to pdf via Apex code.
  2. Leverage Apex to generate a shareable link to the pdf

Now I’m simply working to get that pdf into PandaDoc as an attachment. However, any attempts to do this by passing the URL or encodedfile data thus far has failed. 

 

Getting closer, but not quite there yet 

Sorry to hear it wouldn’t support HTML or Markdown @az_automation_guy. Thanks for sharing details of the workaround you implemented, it’s a great solution! 🙌

Presumably the shareable link that’s generated is a publicly-accessible download link to the file itself so PandaDoc shouldn’t have any trouble accessing it, is that correct? 

And are you getting any errors when attempting to add the pdf into PandaDoc? If so would you mind sharing a screenshot of the error to help us get a bit more context on what the issue might be. Please remove/hide any private information (like names, emails, addresses etc.) from any screenshots before sharing.

Looking forward to hearing from you on this!

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