Develop an electronic invoice

Question

0.00/5 (No votes)

See more:

Good evening everybody:

I have to develop an electronic invoice module; take an already generated internal invoice and generate its corresponding electronic version. Everything with mexican legislations, but I guess the functions and procedures should be the same.

I have never worked before with this, and I'm a little bit short of time. I have worked with XML and PDF, but i just don´t know about the digital signatures and all the things involved.

Where can I find tecnical information about it ?, better say: How can I program this with VB Net ?. Is there a portal where I can look for information ?. I really need to learn about this. Does anybody knows if there are any courses ?

What I have tried:

I've been searching a lot thru the internet, and I haven´t found anything; that's why I come to this portal again, trying to save time.

Posted 15-Jan-18 11:13am

Miguel Altamirano Morales

Updated 15-Jan-18 15:54pm

Add a Solution

Comments

David_Wimbley 15-Jan-18 17:27pm

Your question is a bit all over the place. What is it you want help with? Just generating a PDF in vb.net? How to esign a document in vb.net? Both? Can you clarify?

Miguel Altamirano Morales 15-Jan-18 18:30pm

Thank you very much for your reply, David.

Please forgive me, because of my lack of knowledge in this topic I just couldn´t make myself clear, or I don't know what to ask specifically.
For example, since I don't know what does "esign" mean, I cannot ask you about it.

That's why I'd like to know everything about the process involving the generation of an electronic invoicing (in technical programming terms). By the time, I just know vaguely that a XML file must be generated, a PDF file, and I don´t know what other operations do I have to develop. I want to know all the things I'm supposed to. I'd been looking for a course but I still don't find none, and I'm really short in my delivery deadline.

1 solution

Add a Solution

Add your solution here

Treat my content as plain text, not as HTML

Preview 0

…

Existing Members

Sign in to your account

...or Join us

Download, Vote, Comment, Publish.

Your Email
Password
Forgot your password?

Your Email
This email is in use. Do you need your password?
Optional Password

I have read and agree to the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy
Please subscribe me to the CodeProject newsletters

When answering a question please:

Read the question carefully.
Understand that English isn't everyone's first language so be lenient of bad spelling and grammar.
If a question is poorly phrased then either ask for clarification, ignore it, or edit the question and fix the problem. Insults are not welcome.
Don't tell someone to read the manual. Chances are they have and don't get it. Provide an answer or move on to the next question.

Let's work to help developers, not make them feel stupid.

This content, along with any associated source code and files, is licensed under The Code Project Open License (CPOL)

David_Wimbley · Accepted Answer · 2018-01-15T15:54:00

Solution 1

So it seems like you may need to look into a few things. Based on your comment reply I'll break it down by what you indicate you need to do. I'm afraid giving you step by step instructions on what you need to do is beyond the scope of this forum and frankly, I'd be spec'ing out your work for you so you'll need to use this as more of being pointed in the right direction. I'm not sure of your technical capabilities so some of this may seem pretty complicated, it isn't but if you aren't familiar with the language in general it can seem over whelming.

Quote:
I just know vaguely that a XML file must be generated

You need to look into something like XML serialization -> [^]

Or look into using linq to xml [^]

.NET Language-Integrated Query for XML Data[^]

[^]

These are the best places to start. Serialization is definitely the easiest way to go (in my opinion) since you can just build your XML structure in classes.

Quote:
a PDF file

To generate a pdf, given that I doubt you have the time to learn a reporting software like SSRS, you should look into something like itextsharp.

[^]

Google[^]

Quote:
I don´t know what other operations do I have to develop

Quote:
want to know all the things I'm supposed to

Sounds like you need to get with whoever you are building this for and gather better requirements or get more direction from your manager/team lead. No one here is going to be able to provide you much direction because, as i mentioned, trying to instruct you on how to build an invoice generation module is beyond the scope of this forum. I don't know what database you use, how convoluted your schema is, how complex the invoices have to be, where do the invoices get stored...etc.

Posted 15-Jan-18 15:54pm

David_Wimbley

Comments

Miguel Altamirano Morales 16-Jan-18 10:53am

Thank you David. Of course I wasn´t expecting somebody guide me step by step in what I want to learn. I came to this forum expecting to find where to study a subject I think must be generally designed at technical level, or to find, even paying, a course on line or something like that. It seems there is nothing about it in the net.
Asking somebody to do my job is the last thing I´d do.
Maybe sometimes I cannot make myself clear because english is not my native language and I have many deficiencies in writing and reading it, so I sincerily apologize.

Anyway, your responses are very good, interesting and useful for me, so I'll proceed to read it and try to understand them the best I can.

Thank you very much.

David_Wimbley 16-Jan-18 12:07pm

No worries, your english is perfeclty fine, sometimes i tend to make assumptions as there are a lot of people that come on here that do look for others to do their work for them.

If you have any other questions feel free to ask.

My only other suggestion is instead of looking for a course that is specific to what you are doing, break your task down into smaller tasks (like you described) and start to look for tutorials on that (ex: generating a PDF, writing XML). Then once you've found each individual thing you need to do, piece them together to build the module that you need to build

Miguel Altamirano Morales 16-Jan-18 12:50pm

Thank you very much, David, you're a kind person.

I have worked before with XML and itextsharp, but not with digital signatures (I think this is what you named "esign"), or things like I supposed was standarized with the generation of electronic invoices.

But you have gave me a very useful hints and a starting point for what I need to know. That was the right things I was looking for, kind of "read this....", "see or study that....", etc..

God Bless You and I hope to be in touch with you again sometime.

David_Wimbley 16-Jan-18 13:07pm

Oh yea i didn't clarify esign. Correct i use digital signatures and esign interchangebly.

If you need to validate the document so that you can tell when it has been tampered with this can get pretty complicated but you essentially need to look into Digitally signing pdfs with .net https://www.gnostice.com/nl_article.asp?id=256&t=How_To_Digitally_Sign_PDF_Documents_In_NET and a google search of the same thing.

Although i will say, you are probably better off looking into something like Docusign if you need the non-repudication factor of digitally signing documents.

In order to esign yourself your going to need a certificate from a CA authority that will allow you to esign documents (https://www.entrustdatacard.com/products/categories/digital-signing-certificates, along with the infrastructure to handle the public/private keys of signing documents for your invoices (which may not be as big of an issue for you as you don't have thousands of clients, just one being your employer) https://www.entrustdatacard.com/products/categories/pki. The managing of certs comes in if you have 100 customers and each customer needs their own public/private key to authenticate their PDF/digital signatures that they receive. I forgot the name of this tech...its something like HVM or something...i looked into a while back and it was something like 21,000 dollars from entrust to just have the infrastructure to manage keys.

Miguel Altamirano Morales 17-Jan-18 10:49am

Thank you David; the electronic invoicing process is for a company I'm working on, not for me.

I'll check your suggestion carefully.