F10 — Course certificates in one PDF

A craft school closes an edition of its course and produces one PDF: the cover of the course register — course, dates, hours, programme — followed by a certificate of attendance for each participant, with their hours, their final project and the con merito seal only for those who earned it. The cover is composed by document/pdf, the certificates by aggregate/pdf, the node that turns the items of an iteration into one PDF with a page per item. No AI: every word comes from the school’s register.

A reference run on a clean workspace, built and run with an API key only: 7 seconds, 0 credits, 7 pages (the cover and 6 certificates). PDF.

The case

Bottega Scuola Ferraris (fictional, in Turin) runs courses in antique furniture restoration. At the end of each edition the office prepares a certificate for every participant by hand in a word processor, plus the register cover to file. The sector is education, but the same structure fits conference badges, online-course certificates, catalogue sheets, exhibition labels: anything that is the same page, once for every item of a list.

Input	Who provides it	In the workflow
Course data	the office: school, title, edition, dates, total hours, director, place and date of issue	seven simple inputs (input/text, input/number for the hours) holding the edition’s values
Programme	the course plan: modules and hours	Programme — input/json_value, a list
Participants	the register export: name, hours attended, distinction yes/no, final project	Participants — input/json_value, a list

What it shows

• Three nodes fill a template; choose by the result you need. design/template_render for one document from structured data (PDF, page images, layout report, PDF/X-4, always a fixed revision); document/pdf for one document with one port per field; aggregate/pdf for one PDF for a whole iteration, the template’s pages repeated for each item, with an optional cover and closing. utility/merge_pdf is not an alternative: it joins a fixed list of existing PDFs, not the items of an iteration. See One document per item, or one PDF for the whole list.
• The ports are the template’s fields. In document/pdf and aggregate/pdf every field code of the template is an input port, typed like the field: text, number (the hours), yes/no (the distinction), list (the programme, read by a Repeat row), image. Connect only the fields to fill; the others stay as in the template. A connection to a field the template does not have is rejected, with the list of valid fields.
• What is iterated changes; the rest repeats. aggregate/pdf receives each participant’s values from the enumerator and the course data from the simple inputs: the first change page by page, the second are the same on every certificate. See Iteration.
• A fixed revision means a reproducible result. Both nodes set template_revision. Without it, document/pdf and aggregate/pdf compose the template’s current draft at run time — useful while trying the template, risky in production, because an edit to the draft changes the documents produced.

The templates

Two templates, because aggregate/pdf repeats all the pages of its template for each item: the cover, which comes out once, is a separate document. Playfair Display for titles and names, Montserrat for labels, Inter for text; walnut #3e2a1e, cream #f6efe3, gold #b8893b. Numbers are formatted by the template in Italian, without a thousands separator.

Template	Format	Fields	How it is built
Register cover	A4 portrait, walnut background	school, course_title, edition, dates, course_hours (number, 120 ore in tutto), director, modules (list)	the programme is a one-column Repeat: each row has item.name and item.hours (number, 16 ore); up to 12 modules, beyond that the render stops
Certificate of attendance	A4 landscape, cream paper with a double gold frame	participant, hours_attended (number, 118 ore frequentate), course_hours (su 120 di corso), project, distinction (yes/no), plus school, course_title, dates, director, issue_date	the con merito seal is a circle with the condition distinction = true and a text bound to distinction in visibility mode

Design choices worth copying:

• A separate template for pages that appear once. The cover reaches aggregate/pdf as introPdf; a closing page would arrive as outroPdf.
• Hours are numbers, with the words around them (ore frequentate, su … di corso) as prefix and suffix of the format — the register passes 118, not a sentence. See Conditions, links and formats.
• The distinction is a yes/no field that shows or hides the seal, not a text to type.
• Sample sets in both templates (Primavera 2026; Alessandra Bruno, Davide Ricci), so the editor shows real pages.

The workflow

School, Course, Edition, Dates, Course hours, Director ─┬──────────────────► Cover of the registry (document/pdf) ──introPdf──┐
Programme (modules and hours) ──modules─────────────────┘                                                                    │
School, Course, Dates, Course hours, Director, Place and date of issue ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
Participants ──► One participant at a time (enumerate/json) ──participant, hours_attended, distinction, project────────────┤
                                                                                     Cover + one certificate per participant (aggregate/pdf) ──► Certificates — PDF

Node	Type	Why
Course data (7)	input/text, input/number	The edition’s values; the hours are a number, not a text
Programme (modules and hours)	input/json_value	The list of modules, connected to the cover’s modules port
Participants (registry export)	input/json_value	The register export
Cover of the registry	document/pdf, template_revision fixed	The cover: every field is a port; modules receives the whole list
One participant at a time	enumerate/json	One iteration per participant; exposes participant, hours_attended (number), distinction (yes/no), project
Cover + one certificate per participant	aggregate/pdf, template_revision fixed, outputName: attestati	Fills the certificate once per participant; the course data come from the simple inputs; introPdf is the cover
Certificates — PDF	output/pdf	The final PDF

In the public workflow definition (REST, MCP, agent) the multi-page node is written like this:

{"id":"certificates","type":"aggregate/pdf","parameters":{
  "template_id":"tpl_…","template_revision":1,"outputName":"attestati"}}

Reading a run: one PDF, the cover first and then one certificate per participant, in the order of the register; the pages follow the number of participants.

Checks. The same cover rendered by document/pdf and by design/template_render with the same inputs gives byte-identical page images (parity); without template_revision, document/pdf shows an unpublished draft edit, with it the published revision. A workflow saved in the editor reads back through the public API with template_id, is written back unchanged and runs (round trip).

Cost: 0 credits — no AI; composing and joining PDFs is free.

Install it

The example installs into your workspace with an API key, through the public API only — see Installing an example:

node madoo-install-example.mjs f10 --api <your Madoo API URL> --key <key.json>

It publishes the two templates — the register cover and the certificate — and the workflow; there are no files to upload. To run it, paste the programme and the participants from run-inputs.json, or add --run (0 credits).

Change it

• Another edition: change the course data and pass another register to Participants; the pages follow the number of participants.
• Without a cover: disconnect introPdf; with outroPdf add a closing page, for example the course rules.
• Another sector: event badges (one attendee per page), product sheets (one item per page), exhibition labels. The template and the list change, not the structure.
• Try a template change before publishing it: remove template_revision from one of the two nodes and run; then publish and set it again.

Files

manifest · cover template · certificate template · workflow · run inputs