3 Simple Steps to Creating a Telephone Bill Using Reports for WinForms

September 15 2015

The appearance and presentation of a document is important. Whether we talk about the work-related documents, summarized reports or the ones used in our day to day life, each has its own layout and significance. The formatting of a document is important regardless of the type of industry you're in. If you've had a formal education you may be more mindful of the standards that your university or particular industry requires, butthere is no denying that correct formatting will create a greater initial and lasting impression of your work. Remember, first impression counts. Consider an example of the well-formatted telephone bill we receive at the end of each month. The telecommunication service providers pay much attention to the format they use. The important things in a bill are the dynamically-generated content, formatting and the presentation. Most of the dynamic fields in a bill change with the customer, like barcodes and the customer details. This is why they must be linked up with a database table. However, the formatting mostly remains same; it only changes from one organization to another. Therefore, we just need an efficient bill generation system thatcan generate dynamic bills exactly meeting the requirements.

Reports for WinForms : The Perfect Tool for Generating Telephone Bills

Reports for WinForms is a collection of controls and applications that enable you to generate and view complex reports and documents on the fly. The controls help add report generation, design, preview, import, export, and printing to the WinForms application. The stand-alone redistributable application, ReportDesigner, actually gives a visual design surface to connect to data, create report layouts, define styles, and configure properties. The bill layouts can be entirely generated in ReportDesigner without a single line of code and that’s what the ComponentOne Studio controls prefer. Code less, do more.

Designing the Layout in C1ReportDesigner

Designing a layout is very easy using C1ReportDesigner. You just need to place the required controls, to display information, in different sections of the report depending on their usage. The whole layout can be divided into three sections - page header, detail and page footer. The Page Header section of the bill contains the details like the logo of the company, customer details, barcodes, etc. that need to be printed at the top of every page in the report. This section is basically used to provide an identity to the document. Whereas, detail section of the bill provides the core information provided in the document - customer's account summary and the charges to be paid. It is the most important part of the report because it contains the content which serves as the purpose of the whole report document. The Page Footer section is placed at last of each page and contains the information which a user must know. It can be “Terms and Conditions”, “Guidance”, etc. The content of this section mostly remains same for each of the customer.

Set up a Connection to the Database

Now that you have designed the complete layout for the bill, it's time to set up a database connection to bind the controls to. The report can be bound to any database of your choice - MS Access, Sql Server, MySql etc.