I'm brainstorming an idea here and wanted to get your opinions on feasibility, or opinions from similar experiences.
The problem I have goes like this: our customers are billed monthly for ongoing projects. Each customer usually provides their own set of forms that they require to be turned in with each pay application, these are usually provided as PDF documents. It's a tedious and error prone process to manually fill out these customer's forms, especially when all the data for these forms are available to me in the database.
It occurred to me that I could generate reports with just data placed in the correct location on paper, export my report to pdf, then use pdftk to merge or overlay my report on top of the customers required forms. (pdftk is a command line utility for manipulating pdfs)
So... how to implement a user customizable pdf post processing system?
My idea is that I would have a table for storing the steps required to post process for each customer. It's fields would look like: PK, CustomerFK, StepNumber, Command, Parameter1, Parameter2
Valid Commands would be like: Export Report To PDF, Overlay PDFs, Concat PDFs, Attach Email
The post process vba sub would query the customers steps above sorted by StepNumber, and execute the 'Commands' one after the other.
I would essentially be making a mini-macro system. It seems pretty straight forward as I'm brainstorming here. Am I biting off a lot here? Thoughts?