Background
I have recently been doing a lot of customer engagements automating a variety of processes and also utilising the Microsoft AI Builder. Whilst the AI Builder is a fantastic addition to the Power Platform and Microsoft overall, I recently discovered the Power Automate connector comes with limitations. I initially struggled why PDF files passed through the AI builder weren’t being processed.
What Next?
After some investigation and some naivety on my part, I had no idea there were so many variations of PDF files. It was then obvious to me that the problem I had with one file had grown exponentially. Especially as the PDFs I would be passing to the AI Builder would be gathered from over a 1000 different customers and none originating internally.
Encodian for Power Automate to the rescue!
I was thankful to discover Flowr, the Encodian for Power Automate Connector. The Guys at Encodian cover a range of methods for PDF conversion, so it was a pleasant surprise to see that they had incorporated their efforts into the Power Platform.
Adding this to my AI Document Processing solution was so easy. All I needed to do was set up and account with Encodian, identify the number of actions I would need to complete per month and subscribe to the correct pricing plan . Once I completed this, I received an API key and away I went!
How versatile is it?
You can see there are so many options of conversion available but I basically needed to convert my PDFs into PDF_A_3A.
I did this with the ‘Convert PDF to PDFA step.
The finished Encodian for Power Automate Flow
I also needed to convert the File Content from Base64 to Binary for the AI Builder so this is my end solution…
The Verdict
Once I had found the Encodian for Power Automate connector and set up my account, this outcome was definitely a plain sailing scenario. The Encodian for Power Automate connector is definitely one in my back pocket the next time I have PDF issues with future customers!