Creating a Form - Parents & Bodies

If you are familiar with creating forms using previous versions of CAPITAL or have used report writers in the past, then you are likely to be familiar with the concept of "bands". These are the sections of a page that a report or form can be broken up into. A typical form or report has this arrangement:

Notice that in CAPITAL the header (top section) and footer (bottom section) of the report are combined together and form what is called the Parent. The parent body is sometimes referred to as the "container form".

If the form you are editing is an invoice then it would typically have a name/address details section at the top (the header), the items sold (the body) and any comment lines and totals at the bottom (the footer).

This middle section containing the list of sale items is also the first body. In Visual Builder it is referred to as Body 1. CAPITAL can support as many body sections as are required, although it would be rare to have more than one body on a document such as an invoice.

This may not be the case for a different type of form. For example, the job card of the Service Manager might have header and footer sections plus a "materials/parts used" section and a "labour/time" section. This would require three sections. The Parent (the header/footer), Body 1 (the materials/parts used list) and Body 2 (the time sheet info).

Creating the Form

Use the Form Wizard to create the basic lay-out of the form for you. Initially, the Form Wizard does two important tasks:

• It gathers together all the databases that are required to represent the information you wish to show.

• It connects a "dictionary" to the form. A dictionary is a list of predefined field codes that you can drop onto the form to represent the information you want.

Arranging Fields in their Correct Sections

Most of the objects you'll wish to place on the form are quite straightforward to manipulate. The mistake you are most likely to make is to place a field on the form and assign it to the wrong section or body.

The field code PCODE is normally used by CAPITAL as short-cut to represent the "product code". A product code doesn't belong in the header section where address details are found or at the bottom of the form where totals are placed. It is obviously related to the stock items that are sold and should therefore be assigned to Body 1. Anything that appears repeatedly on a form probably belongs in Body 1.

The Parent Body

Let's, for the sake of an example, consider tax rates. What about something like TAXCODE? Where should it be placed? In the Parent (top or bottom section) or in Body 1?

This would depend on what TAXCODE represents. If it represents the tax number, then it belongs to the Parent. This is because there is only one tax number per invoice transaction. It only needs to be printed once at a fixed location on the form. (An exception would be if the form contains a tear-away or fold over section, in which case it might need to appear more than once. However, there is still only one tax number involved, it just happens to be printed twice.)

Other fields that would normally only appear once include the account code, account name, account address, delivery address, invoice total, sales tax sub-total, and so on. These field codes, therefore, belong to the entire transaction, and should be placed in the parent.

But what if TAXCODE referred to the tax rate of each individual sale item found on the invoice? (Sale items will appear many times on an invoice, with each different from the other.) It would then be placed in Body 1 where it would go alongside the product code, product description, product quantity, etc. As there can be many products per invoice, it would be ambiguous to place it anywhere else--the user reading the form would be unable to tell which item TAXCODE referred to.