Recently I have been working on a tool to automatically create PDF documents using ProForm Classic as an additional option for my ProUtil suite of products. It is designed to allow a Title Agency using ProForm Standard or Enterprise to quickly and easily create PDF documents from their system.

It can be run stand-alone, or be plugged into a customized Application with other ProForm Tools. Merge to Email, Folder Operations, Web site automation, and customized XML sharing tools are some of the other tools I have built for ProUtil.

Select a document from the list which is filtered by State, press Go and PDF ReadyDocs will act like a very fast user on ProForm, selecting the Print to PDF file option and saving the PDF document to a shared folder ready for distribution in a jiffy.

Here's a video demonstration of the user interface to PDF ReadyDocs. The operation of the program is fun to watch, it flies through ProForm screens sometimes faster than Windows can draw them.

 

Setup

Setup is designed to be familiar feeling for the ProForm user. It's laid out like the ProForm Document Managers, with a few additional fields.

Move documents from the Available Documents side to the Documents and Folders Selected side by double clicking or using the arrow keys. Order the document package using the Up/Down buttons.

Give the document a name which ProForm users will see.

Descriptive Name for PDF Attachment is the beginning of the output file name, it will have the date and time added.

Select the State the document is to be used in, or select All States to use the document in any state.

Here's a video demonstration of the setup screens in PDF ReadyDocs.

SpImage

PDF ReadyDocs now writes to SpImage.  Due to technical limitations a license validation of SpImage will need to occur before the feature can be  used.  After enabled, all documents processed by PDF ReadyDocs will save a pointer so SpImage will be able to pull up the file.  By default, PDF ReadyDocs creates a folder for each FirmFile under it's shared folder, as does SpImage.  If the save location is customized, SpImage will find the file in the custom location.

PDF ReadyDocs is configured using XML data files, so a knowledgeable person could automate the initial setup if desired.

Multi-Select

At customer request, PDF ReadyDocs has been updated to allow multiple documents to be selected at one time, saving each document as it's own PDF file.  The Setup process now only checks ProForm one time for the document tree, making the process faster.  We also added a copy button to duplicate document sets, and changed the layout of the Document Setup Screen to put the Name at the top.