A key part of Convergence's document management features is the ability to generate new documents using a document template and the data from your database to fill out forms, letters, or reports with your latest case data. Templates can produce output in HTML, plain text, PDF, or Word compatible formats. Templates may be used for forms, letters, reports, invoices, envelope printing, intake or referral forms, or macros. Macros are templates to use inside multiple other templates, such as letterhead, return address, or any other piece that you'll use over and over. Even portions of the Convergence interface are generated with templates. Interface templates may only be edited by the admin user.

Users who are granted the privilege to edit templates may create of modify templates. A user may be granted the privilege to only modify templates the user has created, and no others. The admin user can, of course, modify any template, and there are special admin only templates.

To access the template editor, click 'Create Template' in the popup menu or navigation page. This will take you to a screen that can start a new template if you wish, or pick a template to view or edit.

The template editor first appears with an empty new template. You may start entering a new template, or use 'Go to Template:' button and menus to go to an existing template. Because the list of templates can become rather long, the templates are split up by category. The first menu after the button picks the template category, and the second picks the template in the category.

Once a category is picked, the second menu fills with names of templates from that category.

The field 'Default Hours:' in the template editor may be used to set an amount of billable time to automatically charge for the creation of a document using this template. When a document is generated from a template that has default hours set, a new case note is also generated for that number of hours. The 'Default Hours:' field must contain a number of hours to be valid. This field will be saved with the template adn will fill back in when the template is edited or viewed.

The Data Tag palette appears in the upper right hand corner of the edit template page. It is a floating menu of available data tags that you may insert into a template. This means you can pick something like 'Inventory Value' from case data tags, and Convergence will type a tag like {$Case.value$} into the template editor wherever your cursor is positioned. You do not have to memorize data tags to use template markup in your templates. The palette may be dragged by its blue bar to be near the text you are editing.

The 'Category:' menu at the top of the palette selects which data table you will be looking for tags for, whether that's case data, or invoice data, or contact data. The contact types in the menu are populated from the contact type settings of your database.

Once you pick a category, then you want to pick out the tag you are looking for.

The 'Template Type:' menu in the template editor selects what sort of output you want your template to produce, HTML, plain text, PDF, or Word compatible.

These choices affect what sort of editor you see when you edit the template, and what happens when you click on a directory file generated by this template.

Pure HTML templates are useful for creating reports to view in Convergence, and for interface templates. These can also be used to generate documents for import as html files, or display as web pages.

Plain text templates are simple, but have few capabilities for formatting. They may be useful if all you want is to generate text to paste into some other program, and for creating export files, such as CSV format data exports.

Different versions of Word have different ways of protecting your system from files generated from other sources, and will consider Convergence downloaded files to be from an outside source. Below are notes for several versions of Word. Importantly, Word 2013 requires that you change some settings, or you will get an error opening Convergence generated Word documents. (See below.)

PDF templates allow you to overlay data on top of uploaded PDF forms, or to create layouts on blank pages if you have no base PDF file uploaded. PDF templates use a special editor in the edit template page that lets you drag and draw data fields onto the PDF, and put data tags in these fields. For these features to work, your hosting must include GhostScript and Image Magick. Many web hosting providers have these installed and available to use.

To start a new PDF template, start a new template, type a name for the template, then choose PDF from the 'Template Type:' menu.

As soon as you select PDF, you will be taken to the PDF template editor with a new blank template to start out with.

The template starts out blank with no data fields. The warning 'No Data Fields Found' just lets you know that this template does not have any data fields yet. The controls to the right contain features for adding a PDF starter document, viewing or editing data field settings, and adding new data fields.

If you wish for your template to fill in a PDF document you have, there are two ways to do this. One is that if another template already uses this PDF (say you're reusing a letterhead page), you can choose the PDF from the menu 'Use PDF File:', and click the button to set that PDF as the basis for your template.

You may also upload a new PDF file using the file upload element 'Upload PDF File:'. If you are using a PDF from the web, you must first save a copy to your hard drive so you can upload it.

First use the button 'Choose File' to navigate your hard drive and pick out the file to upload, then click the button to start the upload. There may be some delay if your PDF file is a large one. Once your PDF uploads, you should see the PDF template editor with your document image filled in to draw fields on top of.

To determine what kind of field appears when you drag the mouse across the document, use the field type selector.

For a one line text field, drag the mouse sideways to define the width of the field. For mulitline text areas, the field will size sideways and down. If Checkbox is selected, a checkbox will appear where you click on the document image. You can pre-select a text font and size to go with your new field when you draw it.

Swiping the mouse across a blank on the form with 'Text Input' selected will draw a text field. The exact position and size of the field can be edited if you don't get it exactly right the first time. When you let go of the mouse, you will be prompted for a name for your new field. For this example 'WCB Case Number' is entered as the field name. When you click 'OK' for the name, the settings for the new field will show up in the data field properties area.