deciding on a design approach invoice enclousures

[Ocean West]

the project is currently a basic invoice system, however they do a bit of shipping and depending on the destination (us/international) and contents they have a fair amount of paper work (documents) that need to be produced for the pouches on the top/side and also for inside the box

Most of the data is derived from the invoice or the related customer. I could add the necessary fields to the invoice table for the individual forms for customs / fedex / dhl etc. - fortunately every thing is a form view, and then just print these from a layout based on invoice. via buttons for each needed document.

the other thought is this.

create an enclosures table that a record is a single document for an invoice and add all the necessary fields needed to generate the document then I would have a list of documents via a portal on that invoice - then i could even have revisions and keep previous versions if needed - also a pdf of the individual forums could be saved in a container. based on document title and layout name a script would handle navigation for adhoc printing or pdf, even sending email. and a master script to loop thru and print or make a "pdf package" of the individual pages.

I would have to have a "defaults" table or script that when a new invoice is generated based on business logic for the customer / shipper / destination it builds a record for each required document to be included.

The first method requires the user to remember to run a script and not much in way of capturing who what when of it.

the second method provide more dynamic approach and as requirements increase / decrease there's less schema changes to some extent
however if dates and data changes on the invoice (before shipping) a means to force update (relookup) data from the invoice on each of the related documents. - could be a challenge.

 

[Jeff M]

I think you could further automate option 1, depending upon how much input you want the user to provide. Option 2 is nice but seems like overkill unless you want the users to be able to add/edit/remove forms from what you might call the invoice order.

If it were me, I'd probably added if/then script steps to the invoice process... if destination country ≠ this country, then print layout 1, layout 2, and layout 3; else print just layout 1.