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  1. #1
    kd2017 is offline Well, I tried at least.
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    User Customizable Report Post Processing System

    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?

  2. #2
    kd2017 is offline Well, I tried at least.
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    Well for the record I've had time to rough out an implementation of this and it works! It'll be handy for us. If anyone decides they're interested I'll put together an example.

  3. #3
    Gicu's Avatar
    Gicu is offline VIP
    Windows 10 Access 2010 32bit
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    Just as a side note, I have used in the past scanned picture files (png, jpg) of custom forms set as report "background" with text boxes placed in the right locations and it worked quite well. So in your case could could create the reports and in the table simply store their name for each customer.

    Cheers,
    Vlad

  4. #4
    kd2017 is offline Well, I tried at least.
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    That is one way to solve part of the problem, but I was looking for a slightly more robust solution. I've posted a screenshot of my testing form, it shows an example of steps a user might have to go through to produce a particular document for a customer. A vba sub just loops through the steps and executes them in order.

    Click image for larger version. 

Name:	Test.png 
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    The steps for a different customer might be totally different.

Please reply to this thread with any new information or opinions.

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