Best method for invoicing

[FuZion]

Hi there,

I'm currently writing a program that will generate large amounts of invoices, and I've been looking info PDF programs/dlls, but they're so expensive. Do you guys have any ideas for alternatives? I'll be emailing these to clients, as well as printing them.

Thanks!

 

[Administrator]

http://www.devexpress.com/Products/NET/WinForms/XtraReports/

 

[FuZion]

Something cheaper? Maybe a solution I can implement myself?

 

[InertiaM]

Create your own PDFs It's not that hard

http://www.vbdotnetforums.com/showthread.php?t=23745

 

[JohnH]

It would be much easier to create PDF with a library like iTextSharp than to generate the encoded "markup" manually...

 

[FuZion]

Well I have been messing around with iText, but when I try to declare a new document, it says that a reference to assembly vsjlib containing the implemented interface java.util.addeventlistener is required, but I have referenced everything that I downloaded with iText. Did I forget something?

 

[Paszt]

Are you coding in java or VB.NET? (Notice this is a VB.NET forum)
iText is the java library, iTextSharp is the .NET port of that library.

 

[ScottyB]

Another Free PDF library other than iText that you might want to try is the PDFSharp. I have included the link below.

http://www.pdfsharp.com/PDFsharp/

Regards

ScottyB

 

[Pete (BSC)]

You can export a PDF from a Crystal Report and e-mail them using the System.Net.Mail namespace.

You mentioned "large amounts" and Crystal might be too much of a hog to accomplish what you want quickly. I think Crystal Reports.NET is included (Free). You have to pay for the stand alone editor; but, you can design an invoice based on a database and then output to different formats (PDF, EXCEL, WORD among a handful of others).