Process Files From A Job Folder Individually then Recreate the Folder with Enfocus Switch

Are you receiving files that need to be processed individually by specific batches? For example, maybe you receive a folder of 16 or 24 documents representing individual pages of a document that each need a different stamp added before reassembling the job into a single folder.

Enfocus Switch can do just that—it makes it easy to automatically process files from a job folder and recreate that job folder at the end of your process!

Enfocus Switch is compatible with Mac and Windows, and with its user friendly “workflow” builder, it will take you less than 30 minutes to create the following automation flow, giving you extra time to focus on new prospects and other work.

Enfocus Switch workflow

Create your workflow in Enfocus Switch like this:

Connection between “In” and “Folders Only” folders

We want to make sure that our input is a folder with single files.

If a single file comes in instead of a folder, then we are going to route it to the “Others” folder.  See this article for instructions on how to route only folders to the “Folders Only” folder along the connector.

“Folders Only” folder

With the release of Enfocus Switch 2018, you can set private data variables on folders in your flows with core functionality.  In this example, we am setting the private data key jobFileCount which will take the FileCount variable from the job.  Every time a folder with jobs passes through the element, we will set the amount of files that are into the folder. For the example above, the number will be 5.

Follow these steps.

 

Job dismantler

Enfocus Switch works with both folders and files, so a job can be a folder or a file.  If you want to process a file in Photoshop, for example, you will have to make sure that the incoming job is a jpg or tiff file type. Sending a folder to Photoshop will trigger a problem job event.

There are 2 elements in Enfocus Switch to dismantle a job folder into single files: Job dismantler and Ungroup.  You can find a sample flow with the Ungroup element here.

In this flow, we are using the Job dismantler element.

You have several properties for this element. What is important in our flow is the “Attach hierarchy info” property, and more specifically, the “Add  job folder name” property.  Set both the “Attach hierarchy info” and “Add  job folder name” properties to Yes.

The file count will now be recorded as a number in the the job ticket, and now we have added the job folder name to the ticket so with these 2 job details, we can reconstruct the folder at the end of our workflow.

Processes

We used a regular folder here, but you would normally want to process the files that come through this flow. This could be used for renaming files, preflighting, stamping a letterhead, adding barcodes, etc. In other words, this “Processes” folder can be replaced by any process you desire that will manipulate your individual files.

Assemble job

After our processes are done, we reconstruct the original job folder that the files came in.

We use a custom scheme, with the “Job identifier” property using the original job folder name and the “Number of files” property using our jobFileCount variable (see below).

Job identifier

Number of files

We also need to make sure that our folder name is the same as the incoming folder name.

All set!

Your PDF files are now ready to be processed individually then reassembled into the original job folder. Better yet, we have done this with Enfocus Switch Core functionality and without additional Modules!

Benefits of this workflow…

Obviously, you’ll save time and money and work on processing individual files when you start with customer job folders containing multiple files to be processed.

There’s a great deal more to discover about Enfocus products, so if you’d like to learn more, please contact us today.