"Report tranformation" which writes to data entry screen

There are several situations in Manager when it would be desirable to have jurisdiction specific code which generates a value during user data entry. Examples I can think of include:

I do not know how practical this is, as I do not know the back end implication in Manager, but a possible front end way of doing this would be to extend “Report Transformations” by:

  • Adding a custom field type which calls a specified “Report transformation”.

  • This field type could just show as an update button on the data entry screen

  • As well as the current ability to read Manager data, this “Report transformation” would need to be able to write date to existing user editable fields. So not writing data to Managers database directly, just pre-filling the current form. I’m not sure if this would be best done by allowing writing to any entry field or just allowing writing to the field the transformation is attached to (and allowing it to be attached to system fields). Error messages could be reported via a similar (or the same) mechanism.

  • Jurisdiction specific electronic data submission could be supported by allowing https communication from within the “Report Transformation”

Not sure how practical any if this is but it may provide a method for Manager to maintain compliance with various jurisdiction specific electronic data records which will probably become more prevalent in the future.

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Report transformations (or whatever we call it in the future) will be for reports only. But I think during data-entry, there needs to be similar concept developed where it would be possible to hook up Liquid markup which could modify form data based on input while doing data-entry.

You are thinking about this feature the right way (even if we don’t know what it should be called), it’s just premature when report transformations themselves are not complete yet (therefore not as useful as I want them to be).

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Dear @lubos, talking about Custom Reports do you consider them complete? Besides they are not subject of discussions anymore, there are many features that were discussed that were not implement. First of all the possibility to use them for quotes. I still cannot query inventory items which were not object of any transaction which once I was able to.

Why isn’t this in ideas?