I have been using PHPR now for a few years and find it to be a very powerful tool. However one massive weakness is the ability to create highly formatted forms for printing & emailing. Its possible that my skills are just not up to snuff or that I am going about this the wrong way. I have a "Job Manager" system that I am working on that I need to use to create: Quotations, Invoices & Purchase Order forms which are all really pretty much the same format but with some variable data and slight changes on them. I have spent days messing with Visual Editor but for a variety of reasons the results are less than satisfactory and it looks very amateurish and not polished like the rest of the system.
The Print Pages do not handle the Master/Detail structures like the Add/Edit/View pages and so they are worthless for this task. The report pages are designed for printing multiple records in a grid view and not "forms" generation. I have created custom views but the inability to insert page breaks and other things that you can do with tools like Crystal Reports is making things very difficult. All I really want to do is click a button and generate a form that either prints or emails.
Has anyone had experience with creating these forms that they could share? Some techniques or tips to use external tools to format and then move it into PHPR is what I am considering now. I find the Visual Editor to be very clunky when creating nicely designed pages and if there is a better way to create these pages that would solve a lot of pain.
Thanks!
Dean