Adobe PDF Certificate and Badge Generator

Overview

FlowLibs CF-546 — Certificate and Badge Generator automatically issues a personalized, branded certificate the moment a course or event completion is recorded in Dataverse. When a completion row is created, the flow composes a branded certificate document, archives a copy to SharePoint, emails it to the recipient, and writes the issuance details (verification ID, archive URL, status) back onto the record.

Why it matters: Hand-made certificates don't scale. Templated, event-driven generation issues consistent, verifiable certificates in bulk with zero manual effort.

Implementation note — connector substitution. The original idea specified Adobe PDF Services Document Generation. The Adobe PDF Services connector's file-upload parameter (InputFile0 / "Template File Content") is a contentOnly multipart param that cannot be authored through the API/solution deployment path FlowLibs uses. The FlowLibs-standard, fully-supported substitute is used here: the certificate is composed in-flow as branded HTML (a Compose action) and delivered/archived with first-class connectors (SharePoint + Outlook). This produces a 100%-bound flow — Flow Checker 0 errors / 0 warnings. To emit a true PDF at go-live, swap the Compose Certificate Html action for an Adobe PDF CreateDocumentFromTemplate action (or Word Online Populate template -> Convert to PDF) once that connection is authorized; every other action stays the same.

Use Case

Training and events teams want completion certificates issued automatically, per attendee, the instant a completion is logged in CRM — archived for compliance and delivered to the recipient without anyone running a manual mail-merge.

Flow Architecture

Environment Variables

Connectors & Connections

Connector	API name	Actions used
Microsoft Dataverse	shared_commondataserviceforapps	SubscribeWebhookTrigger UpdateRecord
SharePoint	shared_sharepointonline	CreateFile
Office 365 Outlook	shared_office365	SendEmailV2

Note — All connections are referenced as solution connection references; the flow is portable between environments as long as a connection is mapped at import time.

Customization Guide

Almost every realistic variant of this flow can be implemented by changing environment variable values. A few cases require small edits inside the flow definition — those are called out explicitly below.

Emit a real PDF

Replace Compose Certificate Html with Adobe PDF CreateDocumentFromTemplate, or Word Online Populate a Word template -> Convert Word Document to PDF; keep the same Compose Certificate Data object as the merge source.

QR verification

Embed a QR image pointing at verifyUrl (the flow already mints a per-certificate verification ID and URL).

Badge variant

Add a second Compose that renders a square, shareable badge and attach both to the email.

Cohort / batch issuance

Add a scheduled Recurrence + Dataverse ListRecords sibling flow to issue certificates for a whole group at once.

Branding

Adjust the inline CSS in Compose Certificate Html and the varOrgName / varSignatory variables — no logic changes required.

Key Expressions

The flow is intentionally light on Power Fx / WDL gymnastics — the heaviest expressions are the branch-name concatenation and the approval outcome check. They are listed below in the order they appear in the flow.

@guid()

@formatDateTime(coalesce(triggerOutputs()?['body/flowlibs_completiondate'], utcNow()), 'MMMM d, yyyy')

@concat(parameters('EnvVar_VerifyBaseUrl'), '/', outputs('Compose_Verification_Id'))

@concat(replace(outputs('Compose_Certificate_Data')?['recipientName'], ' ', '-'), '-certificate-', outputs('Compose_Verification_Id'), '.html')

@base64(outputs('Compose_Certificate_Html'))

@concat(parameters('EnvVar_SharePointSiteUrl'), body('Create_Archive_Copy')?['Path'])

item = @outputs('Compose_Issued_Row')

Customize & download