Programming question: do I really need 30 layouts?

[Andrew5]

Hello everyone,

I have a new project. My company has a new contract and I'm setting up billing on FM 9 Adv. The fields necessary are simple:

person who received service, date, customer #, and three more, BUT there are 30 different counties who will be billed

about 22 of which who use one form and the others who have their own form, and just to make things interesting, those 22 each have

their own unique information(address, telephone) that goes onto that most common form.

So, my thought is to have a data entry layout with a drop down list for the 30 counties, and then have 30 layouts for

printing the bills.

I can program it the way I have described, but is there another way to do this or is this already the simplest way to do it?

Thanks.

[bcooney]

It would be helpful to have a sample of the billing forms to analyze what's different. I don't understand why the county you're billing dictates the design of the form. Also, you don't mention a CountyID at all, just a customer# and a "person who received service." Could you describe the data model more? My guess is that the county table will end up containing a calc field that you'll use on the billing form and this calc field is what "differs" from county to county.

[Andrew5]

Since we are dealing with courts, each has their own billing form and it is up to the attorneys to conform to each counties' billing requirements.

There is a form the state has created for billing in these matters, and most counties use it, but some counties have some extra text on it, but for each will always go the particular phone and address of each county courthouse. Each county has its own way it wants the bill, some want the standard form with billing by the 1/4 hour, some by the 1/10th, some as a flat fee, and 8 others have decided to use their own form

My thinking is that I will have a layout for each county as a scanned PDF and place onto it merge fields, and from there print them. The question is whether I need to do this with 30 layouts or if there is a more clever and not too tedious way of programming it.

For each person I see I'm thinking I would create a new record, enter the particulars for each client, then move to the layout for the respective county, and print from there.

This would be a flat database, and this system would be used is create the paper bill only.

Of course this is my imagination of it, but I'm putting these ideas down to fish for alternative ways of doing it. The way I have described it fits the level of my FM programming as of this moment, although I'm always willing to adopt and learn a new method!

[comment]

The question is whether I need to do this with 30 layouts or if there is a more clever and not too tedious way of programming it.

As Barbara already noted, it depends on the differences between the various forms. For example, phone and address differences can be handled by fields on the layout - provided the position of these doesn't change (much).

Technically, it's also possible to control the position of a field's data through a calculation - but IMHO it would be more efficient to have a dedicated layout for such differences.