Generating documents

Generating documents

For anyone who wants to generate invoices, information sheets, or any other documents from the system, there’s now a new way to do it with just the press of a button.

It uses exactly the same templating system as for printouts.  So you can take a template created to make a printout and have it generate a PDF document – making document creation a one click process.

This mechanism opens up the possibility of generating documents automatically too, based on user-set criteria, for example to generate an invoice automatically when an annual renewal occurs. This is in fact one of the next developments in the pipeline so watch this space.

Setting up document generation

Firstly, create and upload a printout template into a view. You can use the print button to preview the output as you’re working. Make a note of the name of the template.

Then, in agileBase’s administration interface, go to the table (under ‘Build’) that contains the file field that you want to use to generate documents. Alternatively, add a new file field to a table. Click the ‘fields’ tab and next to the file field, click ‘edit options’.

For the ‘template’ option, type the name of the template you uploaded above, without any filename extension.

That’s it. Users will now be able to press ‘generate’ when they go to that view and create or edit a record.