Printing and emailing PDFs

Daybook Enterprise 6.1 has an in-built PDF printing facility. Users can print most of the internal forms as a PDF. Any SuperReport can also be printed as PDF. Users can also email the PDF report as an attachment to an email address.

The system also allows you to batch print reports, such as invoices, statements and booking confirmations, or SuperReport versions of them, and have them automatically emailed to the contact email address. The system allows you to specify the preferred method of sending (email or printed).

Before any of the internal forms or SuperReport templates can be printed and emailed from this system, the system must be configured to output reports as PDF. Preferences (Data Manager) are used to configure the default PDF output preferences. Each Personnel record can also be configured to have a different PDF configuration. This can all be set up easily by the system administrator.

Enterprise 6.2 or above.

Windows NT, 2000, 2003 and XP with PDF995 printer driver with free converter (http://www.pdf995.com)

Mac OS X 10.1 onwards, using the built-in PDF facility. Please note that Mac users do not need PDF995 or any other PDF-generation utility as Daybook uses the Quartz library built into Mac OS X to generate PDF reports.

A menu is available under Data Manager/Preferences: PDF Print Configuration. (Please note this section is only applicable to Windows users and specific to PDF995). From this menu item the system can be set to print internal forms to PDF995. Following preferences

Windows users can setup the default PDF995 configuration file location in the Data Manager/Preferences/Documents. The PDF995 configuration can also be set from a Personnel record if different from default path set in the Data Manager. This is useful if the PDF995 file path is different for some users but the same for most. See “PDF Configuration” menu item in Personal record for each users.

Core Preferences

User Interface elements for the core preferences for PDF reports can be configured from Core->Preferences->Documents.

PDF Configuration File:
This is the PDF995 Configuration file path, which is the default path for all machines. However this value can be reset per machine and per user in the Personnel record of each user.

All internal forms, which are available for PDF printing, can be set to be printed to PDF and sent via email in these preferences.

See the illustration below:

Personal Print Preference

The foollowing settings can be set for each report within Data Manager/Personnel and Resources:

File name:

Email from:

Email subject:

Email body:
 
Email fields are used to save the default email subject and text, which will go out with the attachment.

Output folder field is optional and can be used to save a copy of the PDF report on each user machine. Please note each report, which is emailed a diary item, is created with a document attached and a document is saved on the server anyway, so that you can view the report at later stage.

See illustration below:

Note: The PDF Configuration is saved per machine. If any user logs in from different machine for a day or so it will not override their existing PDF configuration from their original machine.

 

Reports sent via email as attachments are saved on the server in the folder structure as follows:

Documents/UserMachine/FileType/Year/Month/File

For example:

Documents/john/PDF/January/01/Statement8273823.PDF

The SuperReport editor has a tab area, which enables Daybook users to enter report print preferences. In this section user can define the PDF print settings. Print preferences defined here will be saved for all users using a report. This behaviour can be changed to work per user per report if required at a later stage.

The main user interface elements in the print setting are:

A group of radio buttons:
Print – Checked by default
Generate PDF – Not checked by default
Checkbox Email – Checked only if Generate PDF is checked

Email From : String 80
Email To: String 80
Subject: Text
Email Body: Text

See the illustration below:

The filename can contain special tokens which will use values from data when creating the file name.

For example if you wanted to put the reference number in the file name, you could define file name in the field above, as “Booking<BookingCode>” which will create the name “Booking12345670” where 12345670 is a booking code. For Invoices the file field might contain “Invoice<InvoiceNo>” which would create the file name “Invoice12345670”, assuming that the Invoice Number was 12345670.

See list of other useful tokens below:

• <DDMMYEAR> will add date in format 31122006
• <MMDDYEAR> will add date in format 12312006
• <YEARMMDD> will add date in format 20071231
• <MMYEAR> will add date in format 122007
• <YEARMM> will add date in format 200712
  
• <DDMMYY> will add date in format 311206
  
• <MMDDYY> will add date in format 200712
• <YYMMDD> will add date in format 071231
  
• <MMYY> will add month and year in format 1207
  
• <YYMM> will add year and month in format 0712
  
• <Month> will add month name like January
  
• <ContactCode> will add contact code
  
• <CompanyCode> will add company code
  
• <InvoiceNo> will add Invoice no
  
• <BookingCode> will add booking code
  
• <OrderCode> will add order code
  
• <OrderNo> will add order no
  
• <PurchaseOrderNo> will add purchase order no
  
• <PurchaseInvoiceNo> will add purchase invoice no
  
• <PurchasesCode> OR <PurchaseCode> will add purchase code

Emails will be saved in the Documents table, and the attachments will be stored on the server as per the above path. A diary item will be created when sending the email so that it can be accessed later in the Diary.

Sending PDF using the Daybook Email Client Interface

The Print menu which is used to print reports to the printer lets you to print to PDF and send email,

In this example the Sales Order Authorization has been selected from the Print Menu and you get a dialog like this:

Your email dialog, which comes later, would look like this:

Note for Windows users using PDF995:

Please note that the PDF995 configuration set for other applications in the printer preferences is not overridden by Daybook. In other words PDF995 can be used from other applications  to generate PDF and Daybook will keep a record of configurations for other applications.

Please note that testing of all functions must be performed in an actual user environment before putting on a live system.

Enterprise sets the default printer to PDF995 before generating PDF on Windows. It should also reset the default back to whatever it was before, after the PDF is generated.

Please note that in certain installations of Windows PDF995 the printer will not generate PDF as expected, because of permission errors. Please refer to http://www.pdf995.com or ask your system administrator for more information about permissions.