[New Plugin] Free Client-side Word Template / Find-Replace Plugin

Hello All:

I wanted to share a new plugin I’m developing for free (MIT open source). It allows you to place curly brackets around keys in any word document, such as {first_name} and then use the plugin to define replacements.

Super useful for invoicing, quote generation, and any other means of quickly filling out forms for small to large businesses.

I plan on adding support for lists in the future.

I must give full credit to the library developers at Open XML Templating; I merely brought their open-source library to Bubble!

View Plugin: {Client-Side Word Template} Plugin | Bubble
Editor View: Nrb-tester | Bubble Editor
Run Mode Preview: https://nrb-tester.bubbleapps.io/client-side-word-template

As always, I kept it free and open-source! If anyone finds any bugs, needs help, or wants to try and get new features, I’ll try my best to add/fix ASAP: me@nicholasrbarrow.com.

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Pretty interesting @nicholasrbarrow !

@elian do you think this could somehow work along your PDF plugin? I understand your plugin works with Word or Google Docs to generate PDFs so I figured there could be a fit here :fire:

I’d love to incorporate the ability to output to PDF. I’m working on possibly coding that into this plugin now. If anyone has suggestions it would speed up the process :slight_smile:

Thanks for the notification @cmarchan !
Indeed my plugin enables to convert docx files into pdf, with the “convert docx to pdf” action (demo : https://docxtopdfplugintest.bubbleapps.io/version-test/convert_docx_to_pdf).
It also enables to fill out docx templates with Bubble data and get a pdf file, but on the server side.

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Congrats on this plugin @nicholasrbarrow ! Very useful !

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Congratulations, excellent initiative!

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Looks great! Can’t wait to try it out. :star_struck: massive thanks @nicholasrbarrow

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Hello, is there a method to load images into the template?

@rhenancmarx currently, the only way for images is if the image is in the template; the plugin currently does not support dynamically inserting images into the template as keys-and-values pairs. I can see if the library supports image insertion via keys-and-values if that’s something you need.

Thank you very much for your reply, the possibility of inserting images would be very welcome. :grinning:

@rhenancmarx So I looked into the image part… unfortunately, the open-source library only includes text-replacement, the image-replacement is a commercial feature (Image module | docxtemplater). I would have to pay for the image module (350€ per year) and then the plugin wouldn’t be free anymore (which, I’m severely opposed to payware). It looks like for the time being, images won’t be supported unfortunately.

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Hi! is there a way for the link to be clickable in the docx?

Hi @divinamay : not that I know of… the free version of the software that the plugin utilizes is mostly just text replacement, so I doubt it does any type of post-processing to convert urls into hyperlinks.

Hi @willem1 :
I’ve never tested this against if-statements, so I’m not sure if they will work properly. Depending on how advanced your use-case is, the way I achieved if-statements is to let Bubble do the work:

  • Create one template for every special case
  • Use Bubble’s conditional features to determine which template to use

Hi @nicholasrbarrow,
I’m using your plugin with great results and I was wondering if you could give a tip.

For example, as I show in the pic below, I have with 4 sets of data in a row and I need to generate a docx that shows for any row, the relative data, on repeat (one set per page):

I have tried many times without any results.
It would be very useful if you could give me the syntax.
Perhaps, It would be also helpful to have the plugin using json format directly

Let’s keep in touch
Dario