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Create a Record Book (PDF) From Base Attachments Using the Base Structure & Linked Records?

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Spencer_Mullane
6 - Interface Innovator
6 - Interface Innovator

Trying to work through how I might accomplish this. We are using airtable to store some QC records which eventually have to be passed to an owner and would not be able to live in airtable forever. Table 1 would have the relevant "items" and then tables 2-5 for example would have different types of qc records related to the item(s) in table 1. Table 2 might be paint QC that is for a particular area (1-1 relationship to table 1) whereas table 3 might be a daily report that could cover activity for multiple locations (1-many relationship to table 1). Each record in tables 2-5 would have a PDF attachment of 1 or more pages.


What I'm trying to think about doing is running a script/automation/something that would grab all of the PDF attachments, compile then together by report type, then create a table of contents and add hyperlinks in the PDF that match the linking structure in the base. So section 1 would have all the locations from table 1, and then for each location a bunch of links to the various reports that relate to that location. Table 2 would have all the PDFs of paint reports and then each report would be linked back to the location it relates to. Table 3 would have PDFs of all the daily reports and might have multiple links per report back to multiple items in section 1 if multiple locations had activity the day of that daily report.


Essenitally, I want to convert the base linking and content structure into a PDF (or similar, I suppose some other format that is universally applicable would work too) that can be given to "anyone". The end user and keeper of this info will not accept nor be capable of receiving it directly in our base.


Any thoughts on how to approach that would be appreciated. End of the day it's probably actually a few simple steps repeated many times (there will likely be ~1000-2000 records in section 1 for locations, and then hundreds of each of the various QC reports up to thousands.).

1 Reply 1
DisraeliGears01
6 - Interface Innovator
6 - Interface Innovator

Don't have a solid answer for you, but a couple avenues to explore...

A. This is probably something complex enough that you might need to integrate Make/Zapier to provide more connections and granular control. 

B. Alongside that, one approach I've chewed on but haven't successfully cracked is using the Google Docs automation to build a Table of Contents like you mention. If you get AT to spit the data into G Docs with different header sizes, then you can use G Docs' Table of Content feature to kind of paginate.