Combining content types into a single PDF in Drupal 6

Question

So, I'm working on a Drupal 6 project that ultimately replaces a big, complex Excel spreadsheet with a workflow as such:

1. Customer books an appointment via the Bookings API
2. Employee goes to customer and does a bunch of measurements
3. Employee enters measurements into either an uploaded Excel spreadsheet or a web-based form
4. Website generates a PDF with measurement sheet and the output from the Invoice module
5. Customer receives an email with link to watermarked version of PDF.
6. Customer pays online and receives link to unwatermarked PDF.

My questions are:

• What is the best way to go about Part 3 (Such that the data can be used by Parts 4-6)? CCK fields and a custom content type?
• What is the best way to combine content types (I.e., "Measurements" custom content type with "Invoice" content type) into a single PDF?
• Bonus Marks: Any way to auto-populate Invoice module content types?

Any help will be muchly appreciated!

Answer 1

I ended up using:

a. Storm for CRM functionality

b. Simple Payments for Storm Invoice payment

c. Print module for PDF output

d. Calendar (+ Views) for appointment booking (Used internally; stage 1 changed to "employee sets up appointment" in Storm Project)

e. CCK + Flexifield for the measurement sheet content type

f. Custom-written module to pass cost values to Storm and automate tasks between Storm/CCK measurement sheet.

Ubercart really is overkill for simple payment applications. Alas, Simple Payments is pretty poorly supported. If only there was a unified payment API or something...

Answer 2

You are actyally trying to sell a product with customisable input (comparable to a t-shirt with a custom print, but instead of using a custom picture, you use custom data).

Here is what I did for a comparable project:

• Use ubercart: http://www.ubercart.org/
• Use the UC Node Checkout extension, this allows you to link a node to an ubercart product and use the information in the node for your customised product: http://drupal.org/project/uc_node_checkout
• Here's an excellent walkthrough for UC Node Checkout: http://drupaleasy.com/blogs/ultimike/2009/03/event-registration-ubercart
• You can use FileField for uploading the Excel file: http://drupal.org/project/filefield
• Make sure you use the Transliteration module: http://drupal.org/project/transliteration
• The PECL upload progress is also nice to have
• You will also need a csv reader, but haven't tried this yet
• Finally, to give a link to the file, you can use the Ubercart selling files mechanism: http://www.ubercart.org/docs/user/3345/selling_files

Bonus:

• You can use the Automatic node tite module to autoname a node: http://drupal.org/project/auto_nodetitle
• For other fields, you can use the token mechanism: http://drupal.org/project/token