Emailing Someone a Fancy PDF When They Submit a Google Form

Google Forms are a great way to gather and process Application Forms, but often the data entered is very text heavy and apart from a Google Spreadsheet being a hopeless way to read text, the submitted might need a "better formatted" version of their submission.

Here's a code snippet that builds on the ideas in a previous post,
Using Google Docs To Make Google Spreadsheets Easier to Read, where we use Apps Script to make it easy to add {tags} to a document that correspond to the names of headers in a spreadsheet and then use that document as a template.

This code, gathers the student's name and email and shows how to create a rendered Google Document and then email the PDF of their data back to them when they submit a Google Form.

var folder_id = 'YOUR_FOLDER_ID_HERE'

var institution_folder = DocsList.getFolderById( folder_id )
    var personal_folder = institution_folder.createFolder(student_name) 
    
    var template_id = 'YOUR_TEMPLATE_DOC_ID' // The Application Form
    var template_doc = DocsList.getFileById(template_id)
    var new_doc_id = template_doc.makeCopy("Application: " + new_doc_title).getId()
    var doc = DocsList.getFileById(new_doc_id)  //Move to destination folder
    doc.addToFolder(personal_folder)
    
    //Open the document for content editing
    var new_doc = DocumentApp.openById( new_doc_id )
    //Render the values into the doc
    var s = ''
    for ( var key in values) {  
      var value = values[key][0]
      var tag = "{" + key + "}"
      s+=  tag + " " + values[key][0] + "\r"
      new_doc.replaceText(tag, value ) 
    }
    //Replace any unreplaced tags for tidiness
    new_doc.replaceText("\{.*?\}", "" ) 
    new_doc.saveAndClose() // Force changes
   
    var new_doc = DocumentApp.openById(new_doc_id)
    var pdf_blob = doc.getAs(MimeType.PDF)
    personal_folder.createFile(pdf_blob)
    
    //Send email to student.
    var text = new_doc_title + "\r\r\r"
    text = text +  'Your application has been received, thank you. \r'
    text = text + "\r\r\r"
    
    MailApp.sendEmail(student_email, 'Application Received: ' + new_doc_title , text, {name: 'Automatic Script',
                      noReply:true,
                      attachments: [pdf_blob],
                      }) 
    doc.setTrashed(true)//Optional...you might choose to keep it.

The above code would be added somewhere in your onFormSubmit() function.

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