Retool App document upload > OCR tool > Prefill form data in Retool App

App Building
1

Hi there,

New to Retool and wondering if anyone has experience or advice on OCR?

In the flow I'm building I need to extract a few data points from a PDF document; in order to prefill some fields. Does anyone know if the following flow is possible or something similar?

  • User uploads PDF via Retool app.
  • PDF is sent to third party OCR tool (eg nanonets)
  • Trained OCR tool extracts the data required from PDF
  • Retool app receives the extracted data in assigned fields if successfully extracted and user can save and submit the data.

Is any of this possible with Retool or will I need to go with a custom internal solution?

Many thanks!

2

Hi @dominic-rg!

Welcome to Retool, I'd be happy to explore this you. :slight_smile:

To confirm your flow, would something like this work for you?

  1. User uploads a PDF via your Retool app via the File Input component
  2. Make a POST request to the OCR tool's API endpoint, providing the PDF file as input.
  3. The OCR tool processes the PDF and extracts the required data points.
  4. The OCR tool creates a response with the extracted data in a structured format (e.g., JSON).
  5. In Retool, make a GET request to the OCR tool to get the extracted data
  6. Display the extracted data in Retool

To implement this, your OCR tool will need to offer an API integration and have endpoints that accept a PDF file via POST and can share data from a GET.

1 Like
3

Great; thank you.

4