Episode 6: Designing Wizards for Interactive Letter Writing

Do you want to give the person writing a letter step-by-step guidance in the document creation process? Or is the document composition very dynamic based on data input? If your answer is “yes,” then a document wizard is the solution.

Designing a wizard in Business Designer is like designing a guided tour through the document creation process and letting the document assemble as the writer goes along.

What you need for a wizard

Imagine you want to design a highly personalized product offer. Depending on customer details such as place of residence, gender, age and interests, the document offer should contain relevant data and also include specific sections in the document.

All it takes to create a wizard is a base document template with variables, wizard forms and building blocks such as text or images. With these reusable building blocks, you define the steps that the wizard is made of.

For example, a wizard step with variable actions helps the writer populate the address variables with customer data.

If the document should include a special bonus offer only if the customer has agreed to it, define building block actions with rules for your wizard that will include the related building block only if the rule evaluates to “true.”

You can also define different paths through the wizard by defining transitions. For example, you may want to skip the step about additional bonus offers if the customer has not agreed to it in a previous step.

How to design the wizard form steps

Each step in the wizard is actually a reusable wizard form building block, such as an input field. 

Business Designer comes with predefined form elements like text input fields, drop-down lists, check boxes and radio buttons that you can use and arrange in your form as you like.

Tip: To guide and support your writers even more in the data entry process, you can set data validation rules and also select a service for dynamic data retrieval as you design the form.

Conclusion

With document wizards, you design the perfect tool for interactive letter writing, guiding your writers through the document creation process. Wizards and wizard forms can be created as easily as any re-usable building blocks. And the cool thing is that it works on Desktop, Web and Mobile – out of the box from the same single source definition!

To find out more about working with document wizards in Business Designer, see the Papyrus user documentation or register for our Papyrus Correspondence / Business Designer workshop.

View all episodes from our Tips & Tricks series on Papyrus Business Designer for Correspondence:

• Episode 1: Customize Lists with Reusable Building Blocks
• Episode 2: Let your Document Speak More than One Language
• Episode 3: Localize Numbers and Dates with Custom Variable Formats
• Episode 4: Choose the right table for your business requirement
• Episode 5: Document Design with Release and Change Management
• Episode 6: Designing Wizards for Interactive Letter Writing