Case documents specifications

Ensure that your application generates the necessary documents in a case life cycle by learning more about the specifications of the elements that you can include in your case documents. You can then save time by generating documents that do not display error messages, and understand how you can achieve your business goals by including relevant business data in the output documents.

Rich text editor

When you include text rich editors in your documents, consider the following factors:

  • Documents only support rich text editors (RTEs) that you embed in a top-level paragraph alone. Documents do not support RTE that you insert in the following places:
    • Inside lists and tables
    • Inside paragraphs that contain text or expressions
  • RTEs might have issues with processing large images. To avoid this problem, use images with a smaller width and height.
  • RTEs that you render in a browser, and then embed inside a .docx document, might look different.
  • If an output document includes an RTE, you cannot convert it to .pdf format with tools such as Apache POI, IText, or FOP.

Links

Documents support only static links with dynamic text.

Attachments

  • When you use MS Office on Mac OS to create a template, the application processes only Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) that are images.
  • The output case document is generated in .docx format, in which images and attachments are embedded as inline attachments. The document generates other attachments as icons with attachment names. Users can then locate the attachments in the Recent content section.
  • Documents only support the Data-WorkAttach-File and Rule-File-Binary rule types.
  • Applications can source attachments from a Pega database or any external storage that Pega Platform supports.

Text area

  • Documents treat text areas as standard text, however, this approach requires a lot of API processing to maintain line breaks. Too many text areas might slow down generation of the document.
  • For faster processing, use a text area field by itself, within a paragraph.

Nested paragraphs

Documents support only scalar properties inside nested paragraphs.

Tables

  • One row can only contain a single page list property. For example, one row can only have the .pxResults().pyLabels or .pyResults().pyLabelproperty. If you create repeating rows, reference the columns from the same page list.
  • Documents support only image attachments in tables.
  • Documents do not support HTML in tables.

Headers and footers

  • Documents support only image attachments in headers and footers.
  • Documents do not support HTML in headers and footers.

Images

  • Large images might cause issues in output documents. To avoid these issues, use the width and height key in a JSON expression when you embed an image. Size values are measured in pixels.
  • Images in .gif and .svg formats do not work consistently with document generation. To avoid issues, use images in other formats.