Placeholder

Customer Forum

Bringing your quotations alive with product pictures

Workbooks Support Posted: 2012-03-22 22:58

You can make your quotations much more compelling to your customers by including pictures of what you're selling.

Quotations in Workbooks comprise a header and a set of "line items". As standard, Workbooks produces PDFs including a table of line items; this is all text and numbers. The effect we want is to associate a picture with each line item: by creating a custom PDF template you can change the content and appearance of the printable quotation to something like this (click to enlarge):

 

PDF Screenshot - with Pictures

 

To make it easy for your users you should populate the Product Book with records for the items you are selling. You'll store a link (URL) to each product's picture here (these can be held in the Workbooks Upload Library). When a product is added to a quotation the link is copied into the quotation. 

 

1. Create a text custom field - call it Picture - in the Product Book. 

 

2. Create a text custom field, which must have the same name, in the Quotation line items. Since it has the same name it'll be populated with the values from the same field in the selected product record. Find out the field's name (it'll be something like cf_customer_quotation_line_item_picture): you'll need this for the next step.

 

3. Adapt a quotation PDF template to include a reference to this field and upload it. The modification to the template at its most basic is to put this into the Description table cell:

   <fo:block>
     <fo:external-graphic src="url()" content-height="2cm">
       <xsl:attribute name="src"><xsl:value-of
        select="cf_customer_quotation_line_item_picture"
        /></xsl:attribute>
     </fo:external-graphic>
   </fo:block>

4. Populate the Product Book with pictures. You might choose to hold those pictures in the Asset Library but you can use anything which is accessible using a URL on the Internet.

That's all there is to it: please let me know how you get on.