CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hello, everyone.

I'm working on a project which needs custom invoices and receipts to be sent in pdf format when a user signs up for membership. Any tips on how to approach this?

I've had a look at some ways to take this further but haven't settled on a way forward yet. I'd be interested to hear from the rest of you, as this is likely to be a fairly common requirement, I think.

My first thought was to utilize the "print pdf letter" functionality but am not sure if this can be used for automatic emails triggered by membership signups.

I also found this which looks promising. http://drupal.org/sandbox/peaceworks/1094974 CiviCRM custom receipts for the Canadian Revenue Service.

One thing I would also like is the ability to search through invoice data and export it to csv for an accounting package.

If I create a pdf format civicrm/admin/pdfFormats and attach it to a message template civicrm/admin/messageTemplates can I automate the outgoing pdf that way?

I'm struggling a little with this, so any pointers would be much appreciated. Thanks!

Michael

If you do a contribution search & choose print pdf receipts from there (I think it's print or email) it will use the OnlineContribution Workflow template. This does include contribution & membership data

(Ideally we would allow different templates here )

Your best bet is probably to:

1. Create an account on github.com

2. upload your code there

Alternatively you can also create it as a sandbox project on drupal.org

Please remember to add an open source license and copyright notices to your files

lobo

How can I determine when the hook is called?

hey michael, try $ grep -rn 'CRM_Utils_Hook::alterMailParams' drupal/sites/all/modules/civicrm/CRM

Happy Wednesday, everyone.

This post is an update of my experiences with pdf invoices and receipts so far.

To enable PDF attachments, do this:
Global Settings > Miscellaneous Settings
Attach PDF copy to receipts (by default this is No, we need to set it to yes).

When a new or renewed membership is made online this template is used to generate the pdf attachment:
CiviCRM > Administer > Configure > Message Templates > System Workflow Messages tab > Memberships - Receipt (on-line)

The HTML Format entered on this page creates the HTML email but also the content of the attached PDF file emailed to the member.

I have been amending the HTML template to include the company logo and conform to the company layout so that the PDF conforms to company standards.

To test drive, go to CiviCRM > Contributions > Manage Contribution Pages, find the Contribution Page you want to test, and click Link > Test Drive (or Live Page of you are using your payment provider's test server).

You should receive an email with the pdf attached.

I found that the pdf was off-centre - the text was falling off the right-hand-side of the pdf document. Don't know why. It could be that as a proud European I use an A4 paper template.

Anyway, getting back on topic, and the thing that Lobo asked me to post about. The fix I found for the text falling off the right-side of the page was to change the two <table> tags in the System Workflow Messages > Memberships - Receipt (on-line) HTML like this:

here:

 <!-- table width="500" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" id="crm-event_receipt" style="font-family: Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; text-align: left;" -->
 <table width="100%" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" id="crm-event_receipt" style="font-family: Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; text-align: left;">

and here:

  <!-- table width="500" style="border: 1px solid #999; margin: 1em 0em 1em; border-collapse: collapse;" -->
  <table width="100%" style="border: 1px solid #999; margin: 1em 0em 1em; border-collapse: collapse;">

In summary, I'm wondering how far I can go in customizing the HTML in the interface. It could be that I don't need any module code to achieve what I want. Somehow, I think some code will come in handy, so thanks to peaceworks and Rajesh for your code contributions!

I'll keep this thread updated with how I get on.

Michael