Documents Description
Hoteldruid allows to print user inserted documents. These documens can represent rental
contracts, payment recepies, forms for public authorities, reports for the hotel staff or any other
document to be printed with data from hoteldruid. In fact you can insert in documents some
predefined variables that contain the reservation and client data.
The variables are recognized by being enclosed in square brackets. Their complete list is
available when modifying a document from "configure and customize" and contains, besides the
predefined ones, also the ones added by the user. The user can add custom variables that change
their value accordingly to the value of other variables. You can create for example a variable
called [room] that takes the value "one room" if the selected rate corresponds to a bouble, "two
rooms" if the rate corresponds to a triple.
The documents can have four different formats. The first format is HTML and allows you to
view the document directly inside the browser. The second is RTF and has the advantage, compared
to HTML, to allow defining pages margins when printing as the RTF files are opened by word
processors like Word and OpenOffice. The third format is plain text, useful if you have to save a
file preformatted in xml or similar.
The last available format is the email one, that allows you to send email messages directly
from within hoteldruid. For this to be possible the server on which hoteldruid runs must be
properly configured to allow sending emails. The default text of the message will be the one of the
document, but it will be possible to edit it before sending. The default recipient will be the
client's email address, when available. It is also possible to save a file to be attached to the
email, this being useful for sending maps or images.
The documents in HTML or RTF format can also be saved as a file on the server where hoteldruid
runs. The second part of the filenames will be constituted by the year and a progressive number
compared with the last file present in the directory where the documents are saved. This progressive number
will be available, as a variable, also inside the document, this way series of invoices can be
registered.
The document can be viewed either with one reservation or more reservations at once. For
example from the page with all the reservations you can select, also on a time basis, the
reservations of which you want to view the documents and then choose the document to be viewed. In
this case, if the text of the document doesn't have limits for the sections that must be repeated,
the document will be repeated entirely for each reservation, and if the document has email format
it will be possible to send as many different emails as the number of the reservations. Instead
if the text contains repetition limits, only the delimited sections will be repeated, and with
email format it will be possible to send one email with all the available client's addresses as
recipients. In the parts of the document that are not repeated it is possible to insert some
variables with values that contain the sum of the values of all the reservations.
Another way to have repetitions inside the document is creating a loop with the values of a
document variable contained in an array. For example you can assign by default to the array the values
of dates found between the selected ones, creating a loop that repeats itself for each date.
You can also create parts of a document to be repeated inside each reservation, so that lists
with available variables can be generated. For example all the variables that finish with "_guest"
can be used to create the list with guests data.