Customer Reports - docx (or alternative) - structured report output

[MCPCN]

I have been evaluating N8N on-prem and am working on getting it connected to our various data sources with the aim of automating customer reporting. This includes SQL Server, MongoDB, various HTTP calls and images from a monitoring platform (via HTTP request, as Base64 images).

Can get the data in fine and have used a Form trigger to select which customer to generate the report for (this drives other bits of the flow); but I am struggling with a couple of things:

• How to dynamically populate the dropdowns in the Form Trigger - using a SQL query or HTTP Request to populate the list of active customers etc.
  • I guess this should be done before the form is loaded (or as a result of it loading?)
• Options for outputting elements into a structured report which can be edited first, then shared with customers (this is why I’m thinking docx vs PDF as we can edit it first)
  • The report needs to contain these:
    • Text
    • Tables
    • Images
    • Charts

I have tried the community Carbone.io Node, but can’t get it to accept images (or play nice generally) - the documentation is a little vague.

Any thoughts on how I can achieve this? Fine to move away from docx if there’s a better suggestion.

Thanks in advance - really loving N8N thus far!

Information on your n8n setup

• n8n version: Latest
• Database (default: SQLite): PostGres
• n8n EXECUTIONS_PROCESS setting (default: own, main):
• Running n8n via (Docker, npm, n8n cloud, desktop app): Docker
• Operating system: Linux

[MutedJam]

Hi @MCPCN, welcome to the community!

How to dynamically populate the dropdowns in the Form Trigger - using a SQL query or HTTP Request to populate the list of active customers etc.

I am afraid it is not possible to dynamically populate parameters in trigger nodes. This is because trigger nodes are the first nodes to run in n8n workflows, so you can’t feed dynamically loaded data into them.

You might want to check if this is supported by some of the bigger form hosting services integrating with n8n (such as Typeform or Jotform for example).

Options for outputting elements into a structured report which can be edited first, then shared with customers (this is why I’m thinking docx vs PDF as we can edit it first)

Building structured reports is rather tricky. Will your overall document structure change? Or will there always be (for example) one text, one table, a few images followed by a chart with only the actual content of each element changing?