PDF To Text on Gallery

[digeorgiok]

Hello,

I am trying to understand how i can ask users to upload PDF to the Gallery. I want to connect there input to the PDF to text tool. How can this be accomplish? 

Thank you,

[alexnajm]

A File Browse tool would likely be the way, although personally I haven't tried it with PDFs:  File Browse Tool

[abacon]

@digeorgiok I think your best bet would be a Text Input tool that allows the user to paste the full file path of the pdf into it using a Text Box, then pass that value into the PDF to Text tool. PDFs with the input data tool are funky and the file browse doesn't work super well with PDFs. I have attached an example workflow to show what I mean.

Make sure the user passes the full UNC path into the text box when using on gallery, otherwise your gallery won't be able to get it. Also the gallery has to have access to the folder location.

Bacon

[digeorgiok]

Is the PDF input tool no longer supported in Alteryx?

[abacon]

I believe it is, I just never used it with my PDF work. I preferred passing the file path into a python tool before I had Intelligence Suite and I just used the same method here. Since it's a macro, it might be funky to use app tools to work with it but my guess would be a text box is still your best best.

I would try the Text Box tool with the PDF input and see if it gives you the desired output, I would love to hear if so as that would be helpful.

Bacon

[digeorgiok]

Thank you for the response, Beacon. I’m trying to keep the user experience as seamless as possible, asking employees to save PDFs to a specific folder may cause pushback

Can the PDF to Text tool connect directly to a SharePoint document library? I’ll also need a way to automatically clear out the library at the end of the workflow, so that might be a problem.

Just to clarify, PDF Input converts the file to text but doesn’t actually import it into Alteryx, correct? It seems like the Computer vision tools only work with files stored on a drive. If so, that feels like a real limitation. There’s no way to upload a PDF directly for Computer Vision tools to read?

[alexnajm]

Also note, this is a Gallery macro not an official Alteryx tool! PDF Input - Alteryx Community

If you want to affect the code to connect directly to a SharePoint library, you'll have to see what can be done in R

[digeorgiok]

Thank you very much for all the information, everyone. So connecting to Sharepoint is the same as using the PDF input tool since its using the R command to read the PDFs? 

[abacon · Accepted solution]

@digeorgiok Maybe I am confused but they don't have to save the PDF in a specific location to use the solution I offered. You just have to provide the Full path, no mapped drives if it's on gallery. Hopefully that clears up what I was suggesting.

However, I was wrong and I tested it out, here is a way you can use the file browse to update the PDF to Text tool. take a look at the action tool, you have to select the field you want to update but it works on my end. Additionally, you have to set the file type in the file browse tool to All Files, I couldn't remember how you had to do it for PDFs but I figured it out.

Let me know if this works for you.

Bacon

[KGT]

If this is about making it seamless, then you may need to complicate things a little on the backend. Does the user need to know the results of the upload? Or just upload? The key here is that the file needs to exist somewhere. And that somewhere needs to be accessible to run, so if the file is local to the user, you need to have them upload it either directly into the tool (May be a little finicky as they're not data files per se, but should work somehow), or upload it to somewhere else.

You may be better off having a workflow that lets them load the PDF to your location (somewhere the server has access to), and then have that workflow kick off another one in the back-end that does the parsing.

It's more complicated because you'll either have to

• Chain Workflows,
• Use a Batch Macro or,
• Use the gallery API (best solution, but most effort).