How to Merge PDF Using Automation Anywhere and PDF.co

About Automation Anywhere

Automation Anywhere is a technology company headquartered in San Jose, California, USA. It is a provider of an end-to-end Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) platform for automating any business process. They offer Discovery Bot for fast-track automation, IQ Bot for transforming unstructured and hidden data with AI that can learn on its own, Bot Insight for real-time analytics, and a Bot Store to get pre-built automation solutions.

We prepared this step by step tutorial with screenshots on how to make a Bot using PDF.co to merge PDFs.

In this tutorial, we assume that you have already had a Community or Enterprise version of Automation anywhere with chrome extension as well as client agent already installed. We also assume that you have basic knowledge of how to create a simple bot and have it executed on your machine.

Useful Resources:

Step by Step Guide

This is a step-by-step tutorial on how to merge PDFs using Automation Anywhere and PDF.co plugin.

Contents

01
PDF.co API Endpoint
    02
    Bot Creation
      03
      URI Configuration
        04
        Headers Configuration
          05
          Request Input Configuration
            06
            Configure Rest API Output
              07
              Configure Message Box
                08
                Execute Bot and Review Output

                  PDF.co API Endpoint

                  PDF.co API Endpoint for merging PDF files. We’ll have PDF.co method documentation handy either by Postman or online documentation at https://developer.pdf.co, so that we can configure API as per our need.

                  PDF.co API Endpoint

                  Bot Creation

                  In Automation Anywhere cloud Control Room, make a new boat for merging PDF files. We’ll be using the “REST Web Service: Post Method” action to consume PDF.co “/pdf/merge” API endpoint. We’ll also get the “Message Box” action attached to the API call output. The final bot structure will look like this.

                  Bot Creation

                  URI Configuration

                  Configure URI to “https://api.pdf.co/v1/pdf/merge” in “Rest Web Service: Post Method” action.

                  URI Configuration

                  Headers Configuration

                  Prepare the Header key with the name “x-api-key” with the PDF.co API key. This API key is necessary for consuming PDF.co APIs. API keys can be found at https://pdf.co.

                  Headers Configuration

                  Request Input Configuration

                  Configure input data to the REST web API call. Here, we’ve created very basic service request data in JSON format that looks like this. Here, we have multiple PDF URLs to be merged in a comma-separated format.

                  {"url": "https://bytescout-com.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/files/demo-files/cloud-api/pdf-merge/sample1.pdf,https://bytescout-com.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/files/demo-files/cloud-api/pdf-merge/sample2.pdf", "name": "name"}
                  Request Input Configuration

                  Configure Rest API Output

                  Generate an output variable of type dictionary which will hold the API call response.

                  Configure REST API Output
                  Configure REST API Output

                  Configure Message Box

                  Drag and Drop the “Message box” action and attach it after the “REST Web Service: Post Method” action. Here, we’ll configure “message to display” with the “Body” property of the output variable.

                  Configure Message Box

                  Execute Bot and Review Output

                  With these configurations completed, we’re now ready to execute the bot and get the output message box below.

                  Execute Bot and Review Output

                  If we open the resulting URL, we’ll see it’s containing a PDF with two pages.

                  Output PDF