Approach to Downloading (PDF) Files from Flow

Discussions
1

I am looking for ways to download PDF files from within a flow, given a public URL. What is the pragmatic approach of doing so?

2

Hey @axgr,

For downloading a PDF from a public URL within a flow, you can often use the direct PDF URL in subsequent steps. For example:

  1. Use the URL as an email attachment source.
  2. For cloud storage like Google Drive, use the URL as the “file” source.

However, this works best if the URL is a direct link to the PDF. Can you share more about your end goal with the PDF?

1 Like
3

Thanks @Dennis! I have a flow that is taking care of accounting, and one step requires downloading invoices that I have received by email - that is, the email only contains the download link, but not the invoice itself.

I tried your suggestion, but neither Gmail nor the Google Drive pieces accept a URL as input - the latter states that “File” can be “The file URL or base64 to upload”, but I assume these are local file URLs since the action fails with

Expected file url or base64 with mimeType, but found value: https://example.org/invoices/123456"

Have you successfully tried this before?

4

Hey @axgr,

It the link you provided (https://example.org/invoices/123456) doesn’t appear to be a direct link to a PDF file. If you’re lucky it might something such as https://example.org/invoices/123456.pdf, but otherwise you might be able to extract the exact link using HTTP get request.

It would be very easy to upload files to Google Drive this way.

Can you check if it’s possible to get the direct URL to the PDF?

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5

Thanks! I used a dummy URL in my previous post for privacy reasons, but I have a direct PDF link. However, I see that the PDF is rendered dynamically, so I suspect that the invoice application I am using needs a change. But after that, I assume it will work. Thanks again!