1. Ravi Nath
  2. PowerBuilder
  3. Monday, 24 July 2017 17:50 PM UTC

Hi,

 

I would like to create a multipage document using PB 2017 PDf creation feaure. The task I have is to combine multiple invoices for a customer and send it to them in one PDF.

How can I do that in PB 2017? Currently the dw retrieves one invoice at a time and because of the formatting and multiple nested dws in it I cannot change the retrieval to retrieve multiple invoices. I was wondering if the new PDf feature allows me to add pages to an existing pdf file.

 

Thanks,

 

Ravi

Armeen Mazda @Appeon Accepted Answer Pending Moderation
  1. Monday, 24 July 2017 19:06 PM UTC
  2. PowerBuilder
  3. # 1

The new PDF feature is implemented as an export for a DataWindow rather than a generic PDF generation/document management solution.  So if you cannot combine multiple invoices into a Datawindow then the DataWindow export to PDF would have the same result.  We will consider how to enhance this in the future, but in the meantime I guess there should be some workaround or third-party software you could call to merge the PDFs (after it is generated by PowerBuilder) into a single document.

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Arthur Hefti Accepted Answer Pending Moderation
  1. Monday, 24 July 2017 19:25 PM UTC
  2. PowerBuilder
  3. # 2

Hi

In one application we use the PDFtk Server (an executable) to merge PDFs.

https://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/

Regards
Arthur

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  1. Ravi Nath
  2. Friday, 28 July 2017 15:22 PM UTC
Hi Arthur,



 



Many times our app is deployed as remote app on remote desktop/ citrix environment. Running command line utilities is always problematic. We have a custom pdf printer developed for us by cutepdf but it hangs randomly and we end up restarting the server print spooler for clients. With new powerbuilder I was hoping we get away for all this mess but it seems like that is not possible.

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Daniel Vivier Accepted Answer Pending Moderation
  1. Monday, 24 July 2017 21:16 PM UTC
  2. PowerBuilder
  3. # 3

Ravi, have you tried really hard to create a DW that contains multiple invoices? What if you create a new DW that embeds the existing invoice DW in itself as a nested report, with a retrieval argument for the invoice number? My guess would have been that this should virtually always be possible.

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  1. Ravi Nath
  2. Friday, 28 July 2017 15:15 PM UTC
Hi Dan,



 



Yes I have tried it. We have custom foooters, headers and details which could be different for different kinds of invoices. These ar edynamically set at the time of printing the invoice in a batch and it all makes it very complicated.

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