Item Order on printed Invoices

Submitted by Geoffvet on Fri, 16/07/2010 - 09:33

General User's Discussion

Hi All,

Although there may be a set of rules that defines the order that items appear on invoices (date of entry?, item type ? - not sure actually) those invoices we generate have items pretty much shuffled.
Is there anyway that we could provide a more ordered invoice either by assigning items of a type/classification to be printed together (say drugs, materials, consults, or surgery) alphabetically.
To avoid needing to go through classifying the entire inventory it would be easier if those catergories of a few items could be assigned a type/classification and the great bulk of items (medications and anything not catergorized) appear together alphabetically on the invoice.
It maybe that some of this structure already exists and I just need to implement it better?

It is a bit complex in that on some occassions it would be useful to divide an invoice up by date or other criteria then subdivide within that date as above; yet on other occassions it would be more useful to overide the date of item entry when compiling an ordered invoice.

Perhaps a simpler way round it would be to make the preview editable and then printable from the preview. This would require
something other than Adobe pdf reader and we dont want to have to part out huge wads for a full adobe pdf package.
I use Sumatra pdf to view as adobe was causing me issues earlier perhaps somone is already using an open source editable pdf package?

This would be very useful for large invoices with a multitude of items but too time consuming to use for most invoices.

Comments much appeciated.

PS: Thanks Tony for the script to alter our GST rate. No problems so far testing out. Still a few months from implementing for real. If theres a cost for providing it please advise.

Cheers Geoff

Item Order on printed

Submitted by tanderson on Sat, 17/07/2010 - 22:08.

The short answer is no. Its really something that would be part of the report template.

The default invoice report template orders items on patient name and invoice item time.

If you have iReport, you can download the invoice template from OpenVPMS and take a look.

In the default template, there is a dataSource expression:

          $P{dataSource}.getDataSource("items", new String[]{"target.patient.entity.name", "target.startTime"})

The:

new String[]{"target.patient.entity.name", "target.startTime"}

bit says order the invoice items (the 'target' bit), on patient and startTime.

You could change this to order items by patient name, product name and invoice item time:

new String[]{"target.patient.entity.name", "target.product.entity.name", "target.startTime"}

You *may* be able to order on classification as well, although I can't think of the syntax of the top of my head. If you're really interested, I'll look it up.

Having said all that, we could add support to supply parameters to a report, similar to the way reporting is done in the Reporting -> Reports workspace.

This way, you could change the behaviour of your invoice report so that it changes layout according to whatever flags you pass at print time.

-Tim

Item Order on printed

Submitted by Geoffvet on Sat, 17/07/2010 - 23:21.

Thanks Tim,

I will have a play with the Datasource expression and see what I can achieve.

I have realized I can save the invoice from preview and open it under Open Office Draw and this allows me to edit the pdf and move things about to my heart contents though need to be careful to keep items lined up with the correct quantity/price. Obviously wouldnt want to go to this effort very often but for a few invoices spanning several days it may do the job.

Cheers Geoff