Process orders up to 5 times faster

The first thing to make sure of is to check if your printer supports "email to print" functionality. If yes, you can get the unique email address of the printer and set the email address to the email template.

​1. Create the email template

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2. Create the email automation rule

First step is to create an e-mail template. To create one, navigate to your e-mail Templates view and press on Create button.

Next, fill in the e-mail template creation form. Once you’ve filled all the fields make sure you click on “Save” so that the template actually gets created.

After that, navigate to the Automation Rules view and setup a rule for e-mails.

You need to fill the following fields for Automation Rule:

Name (of the Automation Rule)
Trigger on Event. Specify the event with which you want to trigger the rule. This event is sent from your e-commerce service to Printout Designer
Delay in minutes between event and e-mail being sent
E-mail template
Conditions filter (optional). You can specify conditions that the order must pass to trigger the Automation Rule. If you specify multiple rules then the order must pass ALL the conditions
Active (or inactive)

You can see all the available data fields in the template editor if you navigate to "View -> Data" from the menu bar.

In both cases (i.e. a printer being disconnected or it running out of paper), PrintNode will successfully deliver the print request to the printer spooler and it will be up to the operating system and the printer driver to handle any issues.

From PrintNode's perspective, the job will be processed correctly and PrintNode will report the "done" state for such a print job.

If on the other hand the PrintNode Client running on the computer is disconnected (or simply turned off) the print jobs will await on the PrintNode server and will be sent to the PrintNode Client once it connects.

Please select the price plan relevant for you. If you're still on trial, consider which price plan you would sign up to & select the relevant option.

Basic and Professional plans

Step 1: Navigate to Settings > Print Node in Printout Designer and click on Activate your PrintNode account.

Step 2: You will see your PrintNode account credentials which you need to use to login to the PrintNode service once you have installed the PrintNode client. If you see them, proceed to step 3.

Please make sure to use the PrintNode account credentials provided in your Printout Designer app. Using any other credentials will not work with Printout Designer.

Step 3: Please select a relevant tutorial from below to install the PrintNode client and set up your printers:

Installing the PrintNode Client – Windows
Installing the PrintNode Client – macOS / OS X
Remote Printing to a Zebra Printer
Remote Printing to a DYMO Printer
PrintNode FAQ

Step 4: Return to Printout Designer. Refresh your PrintNode settings page and select a default printer. It will prevent you from having to select a printer every time you want to print anything.

And you're done ✅

Micro and Starter plans

Customers using Micro, Starter plans or any legacy plan below $9.99 price point can use the PrintNode Lite which allows you to print up to 50 documents per month. Please see the detailed tutorial on how to set up the PrintNode Lite with Printout Designer.

Step 1: Create a PrintNode account here.​Step 2: Create an API key in PrintNode.

Step 3: Insert PrintNode API key to Printout Designer > Settings > PrintNode​

Expression language as a condition in the Automation rules
If you are using expression language as a condition in the Automation rules, then the beginning and ending characters {% %}, which are needed when using the expression language in the editor, should be removed from the condition in the rule.

Comparison operators

== (Equal)
Let's say you need to automatically trigger the order where at least one of the item's name is "Jeans".
The best way to do it is to filter out the line_items where the name == "Jeans" and wrap it up into the aggregate function Count. Then you can make a condition to see if the count of those items is greater than 0.

count(filter({line_items}, 'name == "Jeans"')) > 0 

N.B! In expression language, the sub-items are accessed with brackets. For example, you need to access the value of a location name in your line items meta fields and set the condition to trigger the rule if there is at least one item with the value of location name "abc".

The expression used in the automation rules would be:

count(filter({line_items}, 'name == "Jeans"')) > 0 

​Matches (Regex match)
As a condition, you can also use some other operator, for example, Matches (Regex match). This way you can trigger the rule if the data field consists of some part of the string.

{product_name} matches "/Jeans/"

With the expression above, all kinds of product names that consist of a substring "Jeans" would pass the condition. You can find all the other operators and functions when you navigate to the template editor, then click "Help" on the top of the editor and choose "Expression functions".

Automation rule with the Shipping method condition
If you want to make a condition based on the shipping method or any other array object, keep in mind that you need to use the expression to directly access the array data.
The expression would look like this:
​

{shipping_lines}[0]["title"] == 'abc'

Changing the timezone of a date

Dates are usually pulled to the document editor with the original timezone from the e-commerce platform and you need to use the DateTime expression function with timezone to convert the times in the editor. The expression function needs timezone in PHP format, which you can find here: https://www.php.net/manual/en/timezones.php

For example:

{% datetime({TestDate}, 'Europe/London') %} 

Function Str_replace

The str_replace([string: search], [string: replace], [string: the original string]) function replaces all occurrences of a substring within a string. ​

​{% str_replace("dog", "cat", "this is dog") %}

This expression output is: this is cat

Useful tip: If you have a long string of, for example, options text, where each option is separated with "/" and you would like to show each option on a separate line, you can use the function str_replace.

{%str_replace('/','
',{options_text})%} 

Condtional Formatting

You can also use the expression language in the conditional formatting, where you can change the style or hide the component if matches the condition. To open the Conditional formatting view, you need to right-click on the component and select "Conditional formatting".

Let’s say that you’d like to create a packing slip that shows the line items of many different orders, instead of having a separate packing slip for each order. Or let’s say you’d like to create a printout that shows all the selected products on a single page, instead of having a page for each selected product. In order to create this kind of template, you need to select the option “This template combines items into a single dataset” when creating the template. When you select this option, all the products of all the selected orders will be combined into the data field {products}. You can use either the Table component or Container component in your template to iterate over all the line items or product variants.

To see an example template with a product summary, have a look at the template named “Combined packing slip”.