What is the best way to generate and print invoices in a .NET application?

Question

I'm working on a billing system for a utility company, and we have the following requirements:

• Batch-generate and print approximately 1,500 bills per day that we then mail to customers
• Save the bill in a format that can emailed to the customer and also archived (probably PDF)
• Built with .NET with MS SQL Server database back-end

I'd like some advice about the best way to accomplish this. I'm thinking about building a WPF application that would have the bill template that we bind the bill data to and print from. But I haven't used WPF before so I'm not sure if that's the best technology to use, and I can't get my head around how the batching and PDF conversion would work.

Any thoughts? Would WPF work, or is there a better solution?

Answer 1

If you are using a SQL Server backend, Reporting Services should work for you.

Otherwise I would recommend a third-party report generator that fits your reporting needs and create an app that uses it to create & export the reports.

Answer 2

I strongly recommend working with a reporting tool that provides native support for exporting to PDF, it is much easier for management purposes if you can start with a single format and report to handle both the printing and archiving of information.

If you are truly doing batch processing, I wouldn't see WPF as a needed component as a batch job you don't really have much of a UI, if any at all, depending on how you truly implement this.

If I were you I would focus on creating a batch processor that could be either running as a windows service, or scheduled to run at specific intervals to accomplish its job.