Overview of the last 14 months

Statistics

After 197 Commits, 69 Pull requests and 82 closed Issues I am proud to show you a great overview of all the new features.

New Features

In the following sections I will describe the new features of the software. Features like Text after table, Redesign of document and helpful ui additions, to name only a few, don't made it to the following features list because they are too small to mention.

Feature 1: Document overview pages

The navigation got bigger. Now there are overview pages for invoices, offers and delivery notes. The following picture shows the invoice overview page, I had to censor some parts. The other overview pages are nearly the same but with different stati.

Feature 2: Document states

Documents now have states. Here is a list of all the states:

• Invoices: payed / not payed
• Invoices: sended / not sended
• Offers: converted to invoice / not converted to invoice
• DeliveryNotes: converted to invoice / not converted to invoice

Feature 3: Filter on invoice overview page

Invoices can be filtered by date ranges or by payment state.

Feature 4: Quick view and download

Clicking on the eye opens a new tab showing the document. The download button is easy to understand I guess.

Feature 5: Keep track of payment dates

If an invoice was sended to the client but is not payed the app keeps track of the days between sending and receiving payment. When the inoices was not payed after 30 days by the client a little clock will get visible and by hovering over it a tooltip will tell you how many days the invoice was not payed.

There is a second red exclamation mark icon. This one gets shown when the invoice was not payed for more than 6 weeks.

Feature 6: Generate payment reminders

If the client has not payed the invoice and exceeded the due date a new action will be available inside the more menu - generate payment reminder. By clicking on this button a ready to send payment reminder document will be generated which looks like the following.

Feature 7: Change position order

By clicking on the arrows button the two positions will change place. Using this feature allows the user to modify the position order of a document.

Feature 8: Default settings for customers

Each customer can hold different default settings. Customers can get a fixed worktime discount or a fixed discount for parts. This page is intended for making the life easier when working with many clients.

Bugs 🐛

Let's take a look at the bugs. Because bugs are in every software and I want to discuss a few bugs that I fixed after the initial release of the software.

Bug 1 - Position generator keyboard navigation

If you have to enter more than a few positions to an invoice you surely want to have proper keyboard navigation for this inputs.

Initially the curor focus should be on the first input (article number input). When clicking Enter inside the first input the search button should be triggered, which automatically fills some data into the next fields on the right. Pressing Tab should move the curor focus from the first input step by step to the last input. While the curor focus is on one of this inputs, pressing Enter should trigger the button on the left side (create button).

The html, css and js I coded was not respecting this behavior, but I will show you now how I fixed it.

<input
  @keyup.enter="createPosition"
/>

This is the event listener which is on all inputs expect the first one. When the Enter key gets pressed inside one of these inputs, the position will be created. For the first input i replaced the createPosition with the searchAndFillData function.

function createPosition() {
  ...
  articleNumberInputRef.value.focus();
  ...
}

After position creation, the new article number input will be focused by using code. This behavior enables the user to type in many positions all by keyboard.

Bug 2 - Database model unique number of documents

Each document has its own unique number. For invoices for example the numbers have the following format: number/yyyy. The first invoice of next year would be 001/2025 and the second invoice 002/2025. To insure this business logic I added an unique contraint for the number field in the database model.

number String @unique

If the user deletes an invoice, which was important, it would be gone forever. To prevent the user from deleting important documents an isDeleted flag was added to the database model. If the user tries to delete an invoice, the backend won't delete the invoice but set the isDeleted flag to the current datetime. The invoice is now archived but not finally deleted.

If the user wants to create a new invoice, the number of the archived invoice should be free for use. But saving another invoice with the same number would violate the unique constraint.

In most relational databases these behaviours are easy to implement but using PrismaORM and MongoDB this can't be done, yet. I wondered how a big ORM like Prisma has nothing in place for handling this and I found an open Issue which is now almost 4 years old.

I finally removed the unique constraint. This part of the business logic has to be handled by the backend now.

number String

Bug 3 - Calculate worktime discount right

worktimeDiscount =
      (worktimeTotal * worktimeDiscountPercentage) / 100;

To make it clear a simple worktime discount calculation is easy and that's not the mistake I made. I applied the discount only on the first worktime position and not on every one. That's an easy fix using a basic for loop.

Thank you for reading this software update!