Hi.
I want to use SuiteCRM to generate our project sheets, but I am not sure how to best go about it. Here’s what we need:
- Project can be assigned to a company (with a contact too), or just a contact (private customer) - I know I can assign a contact, but I’d need some way to decide if that person ordered privately or as part of their work (happens sometimes that an empolyee of a customer orders privately too) – maybe use a custom field for that to decide where to get address and customer number from ?
- Due to the nature of our services/products offered we need to have more than one sheet to print out per order/project or even article -> Meaning one position on the customer’s order could be an assembly of smaller parts, that we need to produce seperately and then assemble. Therefore the number of sheets would be flexible and also the numbering of the sheets (e.g. 1 /3, 2/3, 3A/C+3B/C+3C/C (multi-part assembly) / 3 ) also it is quite possible for different delivery dates needed for each “position” so that needs to be possible to be overwritten too. - Preferrably I want this to be saved somehow (just a pdf is fine too i guess)
- at a later stage it would be great to fill in some details of recurring products automatically from the database, but that’s probably better left for another time
Most things need to be possible to be overwritten by the user in case of some special order/product
I hope I could explain properly what I mean - if not please let me know and I will try to elaborate more.
Anyway I am currently not sure how to best handle this. At the moment we just have (Libre) -Office documents with that info and the sheets are filled in with copy and paste.
The options I am considering:
- Make a template in LibreOffice and write some sort of Macro to fetch the data from SuiteCRM
- Make a template in LibreOffice and write some code to manually replace Placeholders with data from the Database (those files just are archives with xml,… after all)
- Write a module for SuiteCRM to generate the project sheets pdfs like that
My problems with each are:
- I haven’t really done much Macro stuff at all and it (turns out that is a bit more complex than I hoped
- Manual XML stuff, but relatively easy to do on the server side and give the user an office document to edit afterwards
- Lots of stuff to fill in automatically, but also need the ability to overwrite most fields (and editing a generated pdf is not an option)
Please let me know any ideas/feedback on what/how I can best acchieve this
