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iText® Invoice Demo

Sat, 03/19/2011 - 16:57 — iText

People who own the iText® book, or who follow the iText mailing list, know that all the examples from the book are available online. Part of these examples are small online demos, such as the text to PDF demo.
These small examples show what is possible with iText, but they don't reveal the real power of the library. That's why we've now published a more elaborate demo: create your own invoice!
Let me use some screen shots to list some of the features that are demonstrated in this application.

Step 1: Register company
The first thing that should jumps to the eye, is that this demo application is a web site that is built completely in PDF. Apart from the opening page (not in the screen shot), there is no HTML involved, only PDF.

The idea is to enter company data: the name of the company, an e-mail address,...

    Suggestions:
  1. Try entering an invalid e-mail address: what happens? An action will trigger some JavaScript that shows an alert.
  2. Try leaving a required field blank: what happens? A new PDF will be served warning about the missing data.
  3. Try clicking the field for the logo: what happens? An action will trigger a file chooser.

Once you're happy with the data you've entered, click on the Register company button.

Step 2: Preview invoice
An invoice template is shown. Note that the color that is used for the bold text corresponds with the dominant color in your logo. If you have a logo with plenty of orange, the header text will be in orange! For demonstration purposes, we've also added a datamatrix barcode:

If you want to download the template, click the Save preview button; to continue, click Select items.

Step 3: Select items
This is a dynamically generated PDF containing products in our database.

Enter some amounts (don't worry, this is only a demo, you aren't actually buying these items), and click Submit.

Step 4: View invoice
You've successfully created an invoice using the template created in step 2:

Hint: try adding all the items that are available to the invoice. They don't fit on one page. What happens?

This demo was created by Emiel Ackermann, Simon Debaene and Jimmy Ruts, using functionality explained in the book. If you need a similar solution, contact our consultants.