Transcript

When you're creating a data merge smart template, you may want images or headshots to change out as you move between records.

So as we can see here, we have our image of John Smith, and if we wanted to preview our image of Sarah Johnson, we would want this particular headshot to update like so.

In order to do that, we are going to set up two types of variables in our CHILI Back Office editor.

So let's hop over there.

Now I can see I have my design and most of my variables assigned. I've also gone ahead and dictated that I do want this pulling from my data source.

The first variable I'm going to create is going to be a short text variable. This is because in my spreadsheet I need my images to pull from the individual asset IDs inside the dam. So I'm going to name this variable “Headshot.”

The next variable I'm going to create is the image variable that I want to assign to this image frame. So I'm going to differentiate the name of this by calling it “HeadshotIMG.”

For image, anything is fine, just as long as they're differentiated in your system so you know which one you're working with.

The next thing I'm going to do is change this to an image variable.

Now what I want to do is come over to type specific and I want to make sure that my source is pointing to my personal dynamic asset provider.

Your numeric dynamic asset provider should automatically update here.

Typically, we would put our asset ID from our DAM in this value field to get our image preview. However, that image asset ID is already
in our spreadsheet.

We've told our spreadsheet we want it to populate this headshot column that's going to communicate with this field.

It's automatically going to push that alpha numeric number to this headshot field once we bring our document into tempo.

So what I'm going to put in this value field is the headshot variable.

I'll do this the same way I would assign any other text variable in the system. And then I will put a percent mark before my variable name.

I will word-perfectly, type my variable, variable name here and close with a percent mark.

This is now telling the system I want it to pull the alpha numeric value from here to populate this image.

The next thing I'm going to do before I assign it to this field is go ahead and pull that asset ID from my digital asset manager.

I've already copied that value and for our purposes today, I'm going to paste that asset ID into my headshot field.

Now I'm going to go ahead and assign my image variable to this frame.

I'll do that right here by assigning my headshot image. This should now update to my new file.

Now you're ready to save your document and bring it in to Tempo.