Setup Considerations: Docs for Layouts

You can use this topic to help make decisions when planning your configuration and use of Docs for Layouts. It explains:

Why to set it up.

How it fits into the rest of Workday.

Downstream impacts and cross-product interactions.

Security requirements and configurations.

Questions and limitations to consider before implementation.

Refer to detailed task instructions for full configuration details.

What It Is

Docs for Layouts is a visual editing tool for creating document layouts. A document layout is a specific design for a PDF that uses data from a Workday report. You can use Docs for Layouts to create customized layouts for your standard reports or custom advanced reports.

Docs for Layouts is an alternative method for creating layouts to that of using Report Designer (BIRT) and supports several types of documents and applications. The Docs for Layouts editing interface is user-friendly in comparison to BIRT, and since you create document layouts from the Workday user interface, not an external tool, you don't need to deploy your layout to Workday.

To use Docs for Layouts, you should understand the concepts of Workday reports, business objects, data fields, and conditional logic. You don't need to know the details of creating, copying, and editing Workday reports, but you do need to understand the underlying report data fields and available conditions that you can add.

You can create and manage document layouts using Docs for Layouts in addition to managing designs using Report Designer (BIRT). When you create a business form layout, you can select either a document layout or a report design file as the source. In many cases, you might choose to use Docs for Layouts to create document layouts because of its ease of use. However, if your document has special requirements that Docs for Layouts doesn't currently support, you can continue to use a report design. For more information about product limitations, see Limitations
.

Business Benefits

Docs for Layouts gives you control over the exact layout and composition of your PDFs. It enables you to tailor your presentation of Workday data to your exact business requirements.

You can use Docs for Layouts to customize:

Rich text formatting

Tables

Images

Headers and footers

Page breaks

Page settings (page size, orientation, margins)

Background images

Data fields and conditional text

Use Cases

You can use Docs for Layouts when you want to:

Create a layout for a standard report or custom advanced report in Workday.

Override the existing business form layout for a report or other type of print action.

Docs for Layouts is available for standard reports or custom advanced reports for specific supported data sources. See Reference: Supported Data Sources in Docs for Layouts for more information.

Questions to Consider

Question	Considerations
Do existing Workday report layouts meet my needs?	If every Workday report you run has a delivered layout that meets your needs, you don't need to use Docs for Layouts.
Do I need the additional functionality of Report Designer/BIRT for my document layouts?	Docs for Layouts doesn't support all the functionality of BIRT. There might be situations where you'll need to continue using Report Designer. Review the limitations to determine if Docs for Layouts will be a good fit for your use case.
How does my workflow differ between using Report Designer and using Docs for Layouts?	When developing your document layout, all your work will occur in the Workday environment; you will not use Workday Studio and Report Designer. In many cases, when creating a business form layout, the workflow remains the same except that instead of selecting a report design for the business form layout, you select a Docs for Layouts document layout.

Requirements

Docs for Layouts requires that you:

Use a single, standard report or custom advanced report that contains the data you want to include in a document layout.

Enable the report for Web Services, by checking the Enable for Web Services
option in the

Advanced

tab of the report.

Share the report with users who will create document layouts based on the report.

Give security group access to users so they can see the relevant data sources, fields, and tasks related to the document layouts they'll work on.

Limitations

Layouts created with Report Designer can’t be automatically converted into the Docs for Layouts format. You must create new document layouts manually.

Content can’t be automatically reused between document layouts. If the same content is used in two document layouts, you need to update it in both.

Only one font is available. The document layout editor, preview PDFs, and generated PDFs use the Roboto font.

JavaScript can’t be used. For layouts that need JavaScript you must use Report Designer.

Bulk printing that runs longer than 12 hours will not complete. Large batch sizes of more than 50,000 documents may have performance issues and need to be grouped into smaller batches for printing.

The following functionality is not currently supported:

Comparative expressions in conditions (such as: if [value] is greater than [value])

Data manipulation (such as: aggregate rows (sum, total, etc.), table grouping, table sorting)

Right to left languages

Localization

Precise positioning of content

Charts, graphs, and data visualizations

Versioning and history

Printing with attachments

Consolidated print

Calculated page breaks

Newspaper-style columns

Password protection on PDFs

MICR codes for verifying checks

Barcodes and QR codes

eSignature integration

XML Alias overrides

Import files

Image tokens

Tenant Setup

For some application implementations, to use the custom layouts from Docs for Layouts you must override Workday-delivered layouts in the relevant functional area.

Security

Domain	Considerations
Docs for Layouts	Provides access to Docs for Layouts to design layouts for printed documents.
Custom Report Creation	Enables you to create and modify custom reports.

To generate a PDF from a report, you must have security permission to view all of its fields, so self-service isn't always possible. Example: An Administrator might need to generate Compensation Statements because individual workers lack security for some of the relevant fields.

Business Processes

You can use a document layout in a business process by adding a Report step and specifying the report to run and the business form layout to use for the output.

Reporting

You can base your document layout on the data in any single standard report or custom advanced report. You can't have data from multiple reports in a single layout.