How to Convert PDF to JSON 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 convert PDF to JSON.
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:
- Automation Anywhere: https://automationanywhere.com
- PDF.co: https://pdf.co
- PDF.co API Documentations: https://developer.pdf.co
- PDF.co Postman Collection: https://apidocs.pdf.co/PDF.co%20API%20v.1.00.postman_collection.json
- PDF Multitool: https://bytescout.com/products/pdfmultitool/index.html
PDF.co API Endpoint
PDF.co API Endpoint for converting PDF to JSON. We’ll have PDF.co method documentation useful either by Postman or online instructions at https://developer.pdf.co, so that we can configure API as needed.
Bot Creation
In Automation Anywhere cloud Control Room, create a new boat for extracting JSON format data from PDF. We’ll be using “Rest Web Service: Post Method” action to consume PDF.co “/pdf/convert/to/json” API endpoint. We’ll also have the “Message Box” action attached to the output of the API call. The final bot structure will be as follows.
URI Configuration
Configure URI to “https://api.pdf.co/v1/pdf/convert/to/text” in “Rest Web Service: Post Method” action.
Header Configuration
Configure the Header key with the name “x-api-key” with the API key for PDF.co. This API key is essential for consuming pdf.co APIs. API keys can be obtained from https://pdf.co.
Request Input Configuration
Configure input data to the REST web API call. Here, we’ve configured very basic JSON service request data as follows. We’ll be attempting to convert the whole page to JSON format.
{"url": "https://bytescout-com.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/files/demo-files/cloud-api/pdf-to-json/sample.pdf"}
Configure Rest API Output
Create an output variable of type dictionary which will hold the response of API call.
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.
Execute Bot and Review Output
When these configurations are done, we’re now ready to execute the bot and check the output message box. Before that, let’s analyze the input PDF file that we use in this API request. It will be as follows.
This is how the bot output message box looks like.
If we open the response URL in any text editor, we will see that it’s having PDF data in JSON format as well as additional helpful properties – font, page no, element position, etc.
Now, you’ve learned how to convert PDF to JSON using Automation Anywhere and PDF.co plugin.
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