Top 7 Windward Document Generation Features

PODs (Portable Object Doclets) is Windward's system to create beautiful complex templates with a few drag & drop operations.

One person can create all the needed building blocks for templates by merely dragging & dropping PODs.  And when the content is updated in the Linked POD templates, every document generated after the update has the new content.  There is no update step; it will auto-update immediately. If you double-click on the child template inside the master template, you can now edit that child template (if you have permissions).  The child templates become a natural part of the master template, and are always up-to-date.

This is where you will spend most of your time creating a template. Fast, easy, & painless here is what makes Windward pleasant.

The select or query is how you specify what data to use in a tag (a tag is how you apply your data in the template). The select wizards, one each for SQL, JSON, XML, Salesforce, & OData, make it easy to specify these queries, even if you don't know the query language. It is a combination of selecting the data you want from a tree displaying the structure of your data and then selecting from menus to specify what specific data you want.

The wizard then writes the query for you on the fly, showing you the data it will return. As you craft the query, this makes it clear what data you are requesting. This provides an easy, intuitive, & clear means to query your data.  

This is key to why Windward is so important for your document creation process. Read more on our blog post about why selecting and setting up wizards is so easy and important.

This is key to not requiring a programmer for each template.

The template contains 100% of the information needed to automatically generate the document templates. All the business logic, all the datasource queries, all the content. There is no code required for creating templates. There is no need to create data specifically for each template. Therefore, adding or revising a template does not require any testing of the programming using it. Because you are just adding a document template.

You do, of course, need to pass to each template the connection to the data and you often are passing a couple of parameters. For example, the CustomerId, you identify what data to select to populate the template. But these are parameters passed to your document, not code explicitly written.

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If you've just discovered us, we're excited. Learn more about Windward document automation software now.

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Try Windward with our 30-day free trial and start creating documents in quick time with our low/no code solutions.

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If you need this - it's essential. And if you don't need it, it's irrelevant.

Windward enables you to build a document by applying multiple datasources to the template simultaneously. When Windward is merging the data into a template, it processes the template by handling each tag in order, and each tag pulls from different datasources. (As opposed to processing all of one datasource, then processing the next.)

This allows the select tag to use data from another datasource in its select. For example, if you are pulling customer information from one data source, you can then pull data from the sales datasource using the customer ID of the customer presently processing to pull the sales information for that customer. If you're interested in patching together your data from multiple datasources, read this post on our blog.

Some tags have a start and an end. An "if tag start/end" specifies for content to be included in the output only if the tag query result is true. A "forEach tag start/end" repeats the enclosed content once for each result returned by a query. This start & end can be placed almost anywhere in the template. For example, a "forEach" tag can start in the middle of a table and end two pages later after paragraphs of text, multiple charts & images, etc. The result is no limitation on how you want your data to guide the layout of our output.

This is important because it will keep your source data consistent throughout the document.

An import tag in your template imports a sub-template (or picture). The imported template is processed as though it was inserted in-line at that point. All tags in the imported template are processed. All variables in scope at the import point are available to the sub-template. Because your child templates are live, you can build documents from a selected set of child templates. And these child templates can be placed in multiple parent templates, conditionally if you want.

Sometimes, visible Control Tags may make it unnecessarily tedious when designing templates with a lot of logic. Windward Designer now has the option to hide Control Tags (Set, Query, If, Else, ForEach) in Microsoft Word so that the template more closely reflects their final output. Simply click a button to hide all control tags (leaving Out & Import Tags visible). Click again and the Control Tags are visible. Saves time and makes the design process a lot easier.

‍

If you've just discovered us, we're excited. Learn more about Windward document automation software now.

‍

Try Windward with our 30-day free trial and start creating documents in quick time with our low/no code solutions.

‍