Overview

NOTICE:

These features are considered to be advanced development tools built in the program and are documented sufficiently for an experienced programmer or someone proficient with database design.  Some sample forms and reports are provided which can be used as-is, modified for your needs, or studied as examples.

Our normal technical support will answer basic questions about the capabilities of these functions, but we cannot explain detailed examples or provide training for expressions programming, or debug changes that you've made.  It can take some time to learn the details of these functions, even for experienced programmers, since they use a unique "language".

The Forms functionality in Campground Master encompasses nearly all types of printable formats that aren't grid types of reports.  All customer receipts, envelopes, mailing labels, window tags, purchase orders and even E-mail message formats are part of the Forms definitions.  Note that we define Forms only as printable output formats, not as user input formats the way "Forms" are defined in Microsoft Excel or Visual Basic.  We refer to input forms as Dialogs, which are set up in a separate section.

Previous versions of Campground Master had a set of receipts, etc. available as "canned" or pre-programmed formats with a few formatting or content options.  These are all still available as a pre-configured set of default Forms, so that upgrading will be seamless and new installations have a base set of common forms to start with.  These use the same internal code to ensure that no change will be noticed in most cases (there are a few enhancements, such as multi-page receipt support, which affect the "old" receipt formats).  All of the previous settings from Printing Options, Notice text, etc. are still used and they still affect these default formats (and in some cases will affect customized versions of these as well).

The Forms Setup functionality adds several levels of customizability not previously available  (each "level" of customization below requires more technical knowledge):

Any modifications other than the first level above will require at least some knowledge of Expressions, and a fair amount of programming expertise is recommended for the 3rd and 4th levels.

Multi-page forms

In addition, a special "Section" feature allows creation of multiple-page Forms with different information on each page.  (We don't call it "pages" because a normal form with a single "section" can go to multiple pages automatically based on the number of transactions.)  For instance you could create a single 4-section "receipt" format which includes 2 copies of the Ticket Form (one requiring a signature for your records), a Window Tag, and a letter explaining all of your policies  (however all sections in a single Form must go to the same printer).  So it would print 4 separate pages (or more, if necessary for the number of transaction lines needed). See Editing Forms for more details.

Additional Topics:

Forms Setup

Importing and Editing Sample Forms

Editing Forms

Form Elements List

Editing Form Elements

Form Selection Dialog

Expressions

Data Field Definitions (adding & modifying data fields)

Advanced Customizations Overview & other topics

E-mail Form Customization and HTML E-mail