How to Create a Workflow for Reading PDFs from Web Form Submissions in n8n?

Questions
1

I’m trying to build a workflow that can accept PDF file uploads from a web form and then process the content of those PDFs. I’m relatively new to n8n and would appreciate some guidance on the best approach.

Specifically, I’m looking to:

  1. Set up a form that allows users to upload PDF files
  2. Create an n8n workflow that can receive these files
  3. Extract the text/data from the PDFs
  4. Process this data for further use (storage, analysis, etc.)

So far, I understand I’ll need to use a Webhook node as my trigger, but I’m unsure about:

  • The correct configuration for the Webhook node to properly accept file uploads
  • Which nodes to use for PDF parsing and extraction
  • Best practices for handling the extracted data
  • Any potential limitations or common issues I should be aware of

Has anyone implemented something similar who could share their approach or example workflows? Any tips on optimizing this process would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance for your help!

n8n version: 1.81
self deployment n8n in vps
no using database

2

Hey @ashafizullah welcome to the community. Here are some example workflows that you could work with. Both work with the form to upload the PDF and the node to extract the data.

If you need a more advanced extraction, you can try AI Vision with something like this:

For processing, I can only recommend coming up with a structured format (JSON) and have an LLM Chain node extracting the data for you with this:

If you get stuck anywhere, happy to answer further questions.

1 Like
3

Thank you so much.

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