Why won’t my Order Forms print correctly (or at all)?

The process of printing reports is tied to the templates available to the user and since these may be user defined, a great deal of flexibility has been designed into the Roof Wizard system. However, there are limits to what can be changed to ensure that all the automatic functions can work as they have been designed to do.

We have seen instances where a customer got a bit too creative and being bit of a 'neat freak' re-organised the report list, deleted standard reports that they didn't use and added their own fabulous new report templates into the list in a random fashion. This completely messed up the automatic reports, especially the Order Forms which is expected to be the same each time it goes there.

In one example, the order forms started to print, but only printed part of the job or just one suppliers order when the should have been orders for 6 different suppliers. The results were somewhat random which made testing this difficult.

All the standard reports and drawings may be modified to suit the requirements of your business. This includes adding new reports using an existing template structure or to simply changing the name of a report or drawing as it appears in the list of operator options.

This is achieved by creating a translation or lookup file that defines the structure of the report/drawing and its associated file name.

There are two files:

Being a CSV file format, they may be edited in Microsoft Excel or Notepad.

Below is the standard list of report options with a few extra custom reports below that.

Do not add reports above the last line of standard report options and do not change the order.

If you wish to design a new report and addd it to your list of options, add it below the line. Failure to observe this may result in reports not working correctly.

The process is entirely automatic, provided all the links in the process are there. Work carefully with this and get it right. Do it once and then it will save you hours and hours, over and over as you generate the multitude of report options that you might need to help run your business.

Another way this was manifest to us was when a dialog came up that was not related to generating OrderForms - it was related to Tax Invoices! That was because the Tax Invoice template was in the ueser report list where the OrderForms was meant to be.

If your file has been edited and you lose track of the standard list, a back up exists in the:

C:\AppliCad\Roof Wizard\Programs folder called UserReportNames.csv.

✅ Do not edit that file, make a copy and edit the copied version.

Then:

Fix the list.