Estimated time: 45 min.

In this tutorial you will learn:

Prerequisites for this tutorial:

• You have a valid PIPEFORCE Developer account

• You have executed all basic tutorials

• You have execute tutorial Tutorial: Setup local workspace + CLI

• You have created and published a new app myapp42 (replace 42 by another number).

• You have executed tutorial /wiki/spaces/DEVEX/pages/1586397197

1 - Create your pipeline

In this step now its time for your first pipeline. Pipelines are “the heart” of your business app. With a pipeline you can connect data, workflows, systems and do much more without real coding.

In order to create your first pipeline, type-in this command in your VS Code terminal:

~/pipeforce %> pi new pipeline

Then follow the questions of the wizard:

• Select the app to apply the action to: <Select your app myapp42 here>

• New pipeline name: helloworld

Finally a new demo pipeline file is created src/global/app/myapp42/pipeline/helloworld.pi.yaml:

pipeline:
  - log:        
      message: "Hello World"

As you can see, this demo pipeline is really simple. It defines the YAML elementpipeline: and below the command element log which simply logs a message “Hello World” at server side.

At first, lets execute this pipeline file locally without publishing it. To do so, execute this command:

~/pipeforce %> pi pipeline file src/global/app/myapp42/pipeline/helloworld.pi.yaml

What happens in the background is that the command instructions of the locally stored pipeline file will be send to the server and executed there, but without storing it at server side. Then the result is sent back to the client. This is handy in case you would like to try and execute an ad-hoc task without uploading the pipeline to the server. After execution, you should see an output similar to this in your VS Code terminal:

---
result:
  value: "Hello World"

Congrats, you have executed your first pipeline!

2 - Publish your pipeline

Now lets publish the pipeline to the server using this command:

~/pipeforce %> pi publish

Once the pipeline was published to the server you can execute it now remotely:

~/pipeforce %> pi pipeline remote global/app/myapp42/pipeline/helloworld

With this command the pipeline is searched, loaded and executed purely on server side.

3 - Create a stamp pipeline

Lets assume you have a PDF file invoice.pdf stored in the root of your drive folder. To do so, open your browser and go to this url: https://drive-NAMESPACE.pipeforce.net (make sure to replace NAMESPACE by your real namespace name).

Then, upload a invoice PDF file into the root of your drive and name it invoice.pdf:

In the next step, we gonna use a pipeline to write the text RECEIVED <TIMESTAMP> on this PDF. To do so, first create another pipeline using this command:

~/piepforce %> pi new pipeline

When asked, select the app myapp42, give the pipeline the name createstamp and finally open the generated pipeline which contains again the helloworld log command. Remove the content of this file and replace it by the commands shown below:

pipeline:
  - drive.read:
      path: "invoice.pdf"
  - pdf.stamp:
      text: "RECEIVED #{@date.timestamp()}"
      margin: "20"
  - drive.save:
      path: "invoice-received.pdf"

Your pipeline now consists of three commands:

1. Load the PDF document from drive using the command drive.read.

2. Put a PDF stamp on this loaded invoice using the pdf.stamp command.

3. Store the stamped PDF document back to drive under new name invoice-received.pdf using the command drive.save.

Save this pipeline and execute it locally:

~/pipeforce %> pi pipeline file src/global/app/myapp42/pipeline/createstamp.pi.yaml

After execution of this command, open the drive service in your browser. After a refresh of the page you should now see the additional file invoice-received.pdf listed there:

When you open it, you should see the generated stamp in the top right corner of the PDF: