How to Add PDF Viewing and Editing in Appian Designer

Appian is a powerful, low-code platform that allows you to build complex workflows and apps. In almost every workflow you can fathom, documents tend to play a central role. Knowing this, we’ve partnered up with Appian to create a plugin component that enables you to view, edit and manipulate documents in a secure and compliant manner without data ever leaving the Appian platform.

From redaction, to form filling, to annotating & collaboration, and more – this blog delves into what you can accomplish with Appian and Apryse’s WebViewer. After reading, you can learn more about Apryse WebViewer and all its PDF and Office capabilities!

Like Appian, Apryse caters to every vertical and provides building blocks that can be customized and tailored to any workflow. We provide several tools in a single WebViewer component, and below, you’ll find examples of our users and their use cases.

You can view Word documents in Appian, render PDFs, images, videos and other file formats.

Annotate by highlighting, placing comments, underlying important information, drawing shapes, or simply chatting on the document. Use @mentions to get the correct individual’s attention.

Fill forms, edit form properties like read-only as required, add validation to ensure accurate information capture, and create PDF forms from scratch.

Insert pages, append, split, remove, crop, reorder, rotate, export, replace, and much more. Edit PDF text and edit word documents in Appian.

Safely remove sensitive content within PDFs without covering or obscuring. Search and redact dates, phone numbers, addresses, SSNs and other personally identifiable information.

Capture eSignatures and combine them with a digital certificate to make a truly binding legal signature. Validate documents to ensure they have not been tampered with.

Generate reports, invoices, contracts, letters, or other documents with data directly from Appian into existing DOCX templates.

The solution comes in two parts: Apryse WebViewer Component and Connected System Component.

The Apryse WebViewer component is the UI and a powerful processing library that enables all the above use cases.

The Connected System component allows you to open and save documents directly from Appian. It’s also possible to open documents directly from a URL. This allows you to pull documents from AWS, Azure, GC, or other file storage platforms. Install both of them from the official listing.

We also offer full source code for the Appian component plugin on GitHub and the Connected System.

You can set up a connected system and create an interface. Once in the interface, drag and drop WebViewer. When completed, you can now add the interface to any page.

Our WebViewer component comes with several configuration options.

Add a URL to the document location you are trying to view. You can open files from virtually any file storage platform.

By default, WebViewer runs in demo mode, but without a time limitation or feature limitation, letting you build and test a complete PoC. When you’re ready, contact the sales team and we can get you set up with a license and license key that will remove watermarks from Apryse WebViewer.

If you want to open documents directly from Appian, ensure the connected system is set up. Instead of a URL, you can proceed through an Appian Document ID with an integer of single or multiple IDs, like 1230 or {1221,1230}, for example. If you proceed with multiple IDs, they will be merged into one document.

Provide the Document Access Connected System as a constant to open and save documents from the Appian Knowledge Center.

WebViewer comes with most functionality enabled out of the box. However, to tailor the experience to the user and their use case, you can hide all buttons, panels etc. To do so, you can pass the data elements you wish to disable. For example: {"downloadButton", "printButton"}.

For a list of elements, you can visit our documentation. To get data elements, inspect the DOM in the browser and find the right attribute.

Enable full API to get access to functionality like redaction and other features. To learn more about Full API, please visit our documentation.

To enable the redaction application inside of WebViewer, set the enableRedaction property to true and full API.

The user display name is delegated to the user who is making annotations on a document.

The ID of the folder you are trying to save the new document to.

If enableExtractPagesToAppian is true, the user will be able to extract pages to Appian as a new PDF.

This is the new document ID after a user saves a copy.

This string represents all annotations data. Annotations are stored as a separate layer on a PDF. If the user presses the default save button, annotations will be saved together with a PDF. WebViewer will import any annotations from this variable. If the user presses “save annotations”, it will save annotations to this variable.

We are thrilled to see what you build on the Appian low-code platform together with the powerful document functionality provided by Apryse. If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to email me directly.