Create customized, signed PDFs with Zapier Formatter

I’d never used the Zapier Formatter and just figured out how powerful it is!  I used it to take a record from Airtable to fill in personalized details on a certificate, request a signature, and send the signed certificate to the recipient.  Here is how I did it in case you’d like to do the same!

The key is using the Zapier Formatter to format a JSON payload (with data from an Airtable record) into a URL string.  The url string can then be used to create a unique Form UI URL for an Anvil Workflow, which will complete the PDFs and request signatures.  Pretty straight forward, but it did require two Zaps.

Zap 1: Pre-fill the Anvil Workflow with Airtable data and send to Signer

1. Trigger = New Record in Airtable
2. [Optional] Action = Find record in Airtable (this is to look up an email from related record)
3. Action = Formatter / Text / URL Encode.  This is the “tricky” part (although I’m clearly not an engineer and figured it out!).  I grabbed the sample JSON payload from my Anvil Workflow (which can be found under the Workflow’s API Information) and then replaced the field type sample data with field aliases I created in the Workflow’s webform for each field to be filled in. (see Sample JSON Payload below for the format here).
4. Action = Send Outbound Email.  Grabbed the Form UI URL from the Workflow’s API Info page in Anvil, inserted it into the body of the email, and appended ?d={Output from Step 3}.

Sample JSON Payload

{
  "anvilFieldAlias1": "{{data from step 1 or 2}}",
  "anvilFieldAlias2": "{{data from step 1 or 2}}",
  "anvilFieldAlias3": "{{data from step 1 or 2}}"
}

Zap 2: Send completed Certificate to recipient [Link to Zap]

1. Trigger = Completed Workflow in Anvil
2. Action = Send email in Gmail to email from Step 1

I made a couple Loom videos demoing what I did to make it easier to follow along:

• Zap Set Up
• Demo