Invoicing in Delphi: Show Me the Money
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Have you been looking for a way to tame the invoices in your small business? In this article, the first of two parts, we are going to create a fully functioning invoicing system that can be used in almost any environment and situation. Interested? Keep reading.
Show Me the Money
Because this is going to be a local application and not a client-server one, we are going to use a Microsoft Access database as the storage. We are also going to use some of Microsoft's proprietary database components, called ADO, to make the connection to the Access database. The article will show how to go through the process of connecting to a local database, step by step.
So what are the requirements for our invoicing application? See the list below:
- Our application must make it easy to create a new invoice.
- The application must have the option to view an invoice in both short and detailed views.
- The application must have the capability to either print or create a PDF of the invoice.
- The application must have a search facility.
- The application must have the capability to remove or change an invoice.
- The application should let us create, change and add clients.
Just a few cautionary words before we start. The invoice application was created with Borland Delphi 7 and successfully tested on both Windows 2000 and Windows XP. It may or may not work on other Windows systems. The application is intended for low volume usage, hence the use of MS Access. Because MS Access is intended for low volume activity, it might slow your application down if you overload the database, so try to remove redundant data from the database as often as possible, or better yet, change to a database that can handle larger volumes of data such as MySQL or MS SQL.
Next: Building the Database >>
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