Automating Page Designer exports - is it possible?

[davidcarldesign]

How would I go about exporting multiple page designer layouts as images into an attachment field?

-Could I use or create a script to do it?
-Is there any free Airtable apps that allow this?

I provide more visual context in the link below:

[Kamille_Parks]

davidcarldesign:

-Could I use or create a script to do it?

No

davidcarldesign:

-Is there any free Airtable apps that allow this?

There’s freemium or premium options that create documents from templates that can insert them into an attachment field:

On2Air | Accomplish Anything with Airtable – 21 Sep 21

Google Docs + Airtable | On2Air

Automatically create documents in Google Docs from your Airtable data with On2Air. Edit documents, view files, and manage all of your Google Docs inside of Airtable.

Airtable

Formstack Documents - Apps - Airtable Marketplace

Auto-populate documents with your records on Airtable with the Formstack Documents app.

Airtable

Documint - Apps - Airtable Marketplace

Generate documents from your records on Airtable with the Documint app.

[davidcarldesign]

Thanks Kamille,

I’m gonna check these out. I know about One2Air and Formstack already. I might use a trial and see if they flow well UX-wise. Depending on how that goes, I might invest.

I appreciate the help!

[Karlstens]

It’s also worth reaching out to Airtable support asking them to improve Page Designer, as Airtable are really overdue for pushing out a professional dynamic, multi-page document solution that shrinks and grows with the table/field data, and caters for multi-page document creation without the need of relying on 3rd parties (who, most probably have access to all your data when you sign up with them).

[Kamille_Parks]

Updates to the Page Designer App would certainly be welcome. In this case, the limitation is actually with Airtable’s API and the functionality of the Attachment Field, not specifically with Page Designer.

Essentially, under the hood an attachment field must be supplied a URL for a file. For page designer to do as suggested it would need to upload the file somewhere and then pass that url to the attachment field so it could be copied to Airtable’s servers. The reason you can do it with Formstack and the like is because they do in fact store the PDF file somewhere already.

To fix it, they would either need to make Page Designer less efficient by pushing PDFs to an external host so it can be uploaded to an attachment field, or they need to overhaul the attachment field’s interaction with the API.

[David_Brinkmann]

Id love it if I could just have a page designer extension preview window show up in the extended record field.
That way if I shared a kanban view with my staff, they could chose the page designer layout they are using and out put the document they need via the share kanban view.

Way simpler than having to generate them and then put into various project folders

[Rupert_Hoffsch1]

Just wanted to add DocsAutomator to this thread. It's a flexible and powerful solution to turn Airtable data into PDF + Google Docs and has been helping many Airtable users overcome Page Designer's limitations 🙂 

[klapoucius]

I can see that many are interested in this solution, yet it is not available. It would be nice if Airtable were to pick this up. Basically Formstack's solution but within airtable. I don't think it's optimal to create yet another account to be able to fully utilize the tool.