Some of our jobs use a Banner Page, containing some job statistics, including the number of documents. In Workflow, I get these values and put them into a Create File plugin, after which I do an All-in-One, output, and then produce my actual output PDF, concatenated to the banner page output from that All-in-One step.
I see the Job Statistics Node, and can $count the “documents” array to get the number of documents.
How do I then pass that value into my datamapper or all-in-one node? Seems like the data mapping expects a filename.
To directly address the Banner Page question, this can actually be managed through an Output Preset and does not require multiple output steps. This functionality was introduced in version 2023.2, although it’s somewhat tucked away under the Separations and Additional Content options within the Output Preset.
Attached the Output Preset used for these screendumps (created using v2024.2.3). Note that this technique is not limited to OL Connect Automate. See also: Banner pages
This worked perfectly. I had missed the “Banner Page” feature in the Output Preset, so thank you.
The question of “Can we send data (presumably a JSON object in a msg property) directly into the data mapping node without having to first serialize our data into an external file” is still open. Consider it a Feature Request.
Glad it works! This should simplify the flow in general.
Feeding data from a msg property directly to the Data Mapping node is on our backlog (e.g. without creating a file first)(internal ref NODERED-2922).
Currently, this can be done, but it requires a few extra steps in the flow. You would need to convert the data to a Buffer in a “function” node, then upload it to the File Store using the “file store upload” node.
Background info
In Node-RED data is typically transferred in msg.payload or by passing a path to the file. The “create file” method in Workflow is similar to adding JSON to “msg.payload”. JSON is the preferred data format used, but other formats can be used as well there are several parser nodes available. JSON data can easily modified in nodes like “change” (similar to “set job infos”) and “function” (like “run script” using JavaScript).
Various OL Connect nodes, such as “preview pdf,” “preview image,” and “paginated content,” can directly handle JSON data in msg.payload. Make sure the JSON structure matches the Data Model, which is explained in each node’s help. You don’t need a Data Mapper for these nodes, but if you want to filter, sort, or group records with a Job Preset, you’ll need to use Data Mapping first, as this step writes data to the OL Connect Database.
