Initially, this field was meant to be left almost always blank, except
for when we deleted invoiced and had to “replace” its number with a new
invoice; using the automatic numbering in this cas would not “fill in”
the missing number in the sequence.
However, we decide to not allow removing invoicer not edit their
numbers, therefore, if everything goes as planned, there should not be
any gap in the sequence, and that field is rendered useless.
Oriol suggested making it a read-only field, both for new and edit
forms, but i do not think it makes sense to have a field if you can not
edit it at all, specially in the new invoice dialog, where it would
always be blank. In the edit form we already show the number in the
title and breadcrumbs, thus no need for the read-only field as
reference.
I still keep a Number member to the form struct, but is now a string
(kind of “a read-only field”, in a way) and just to be written in the
title or breadcrumbs. I did not like the idea of adding a new SQL
query just for that value.
In this case i have to use the same id for the dialog content in all
pages because, for now, there are a couple of forms that need to replace
it on submit—the new/edit form and the product selection form.
Unfortunately, HTMx does not have support for `formaction` attribute at
this point, so i had to use the workaround described in [0].
[0] https://github.com/bigskysoftware/htmx/issues/623
Instead of using links in the invoice tags, that we will replace with a
“click-to-edit field”, with Oriol agreed to add a form with filters that
includes not only the tags but also dates, customer, status, and the
invoice number.
This means i now need dynamic SQL, and i do not think this belongs to
the database (i.e., no PL/pgSQL function for that). I have looked at
query builder libraries for Golang, and did not find anything that
suited me: either they wanted to manage not only the SQL query but also
all structs, or they managed to confuse Goland’s SQL analyzer.
For now, at least, i am using a very simple approach with arrays, that
still confuses Goland’s analyzer, but just in a very specific part,
which i find tolerable—not that their analyzer is that great to begin
with, but that’s a story for another day.
We agreed with Oriol that this link would only serve to confuse people.
I initially added the link because i thought it was a shame to have to
navigate to the contact section to look or change the info of a customer
that you have an invoice for in front of you. However, it makes little
sense to be able to edit the contact from both sections, and we do not
have a “view page” for contacts to link to, thus the removal.
Had to add the editProductPage because now i need to know the slug in
order to build the form’s action link. I also added the `ProductName`
field because it was less awkward than using `.Form.Name` everywhere.
Mostly, the same problem as before: if the document title does not
reflect the application’s state, it becomes useless when there are
multiple open tabs.
In this case, however, i do not know how to tell HTMx to restore the
title to how it was before opening the dialog without a new request to
the server, that makes no sense when the dialog was closed without any
change whatsoever. Thus, i do it with JavaScript on the client side.
With Oriol we agreed that products should have tags, too, and that the
“tag pool”, as it were, should be shared with the one for invoices and
contacts.
Had to add the `company_id` attribute in the `using` clause for `tag` in
`MustFillFromDatabase`, even though it’s not strictly necessary, because
then PostgreSQL does not know which `company_id` attribute use for the
join with `company`—the one from `product` or the one from `tag`.
With Oriol we agreed that contacts should have tags, too, and that the
“tag pool”, as it were, should be shared with the one for invoices (and
all future tags we might add).
I added the contact_tag relation and tag_contact function, just like
with invoices, and then realized that the SQL queries that Go had to
execute were becoming “complex” enough: i had to get not only the slug,
but the contact id to call tag_contact, and all inside a transaction.
Therefore, i opted to create the add_contact and edit_contact functions,
that mirror those for invoice and products, so now each “major” section
has these functions. They also simplified a bit the handling of the
VATIN and phone numbers, because it is now encapsuled inside the
PL/pgSQL function and Go does not know how to assemble the parts.
We do not have any design yet for errors and other notifications, so i
followed material design, for now, since we already kind of use their
input fields design.
This time i decided to use AlpineJS because there is not that much HTML
code, and the transitioning is way easier to do in AlpineJS than it
would be with plain JavaScript—not to mention the bugs i would
introduce.
I am not sure if, at the end, all pages that now use
mustRenderAppTemplate will be replaced with mustRenderMainTemplate,
but for now i keep them separate to know which routes are already
“boosted”.
Had to change the data context for that template to include the Slug,
so that the <form> element can set the correct `action` instead of
using the current URI, as it is no longer “correct” (form-wise) when
using HTMx.
This is more or less the same as a multiselect, except that now it
adds a list of string element that you write into the search element.
It is supposed to fetch a list of tag suggestions from the server, but i
have not implemented it yet.
What i really set off on was to refactor the multiselect’s x-data
context to a separate JavaScript file.
I did not see the need at first, thinking that it would not matter
because it was used only in a template and i was not duplicating the
code in my files. However, i then realized that having the context
in the template means the visitor has to download it each and every time
it accesses a form with a multiselect, even if nothing changed, and,
worse, it would download it multiple times if there were many
multiselect controls.
It makes more sense to put all that into a file that the browser would
only download and parse once, if the proper caching is set.
Once i realized that, it was a shame that AlpineJS has no way to do
the same for the HTML structure[0], for the exact same reasons: not
wanting to download many times the same extra <template> and other
markup required to build the control for JavaScript users. And then i
remembered that this is supposed to be custom element’s main selling
point.
At first i tried to create a shadow DOW to replace the <select> with
the same <div> and <ul> that i used with Alpine, but it turns out that
<select> is not one of the allowed elements that can have a shadow root
attached[0].
Therefore, i changed the custom element to extend the <div> for the
<select> and <label> instead—the same element that had the x-init
context—, but i would have to define or include all the styles inside
the shadow DOM, and bring the lang attribute, for it to look like it
did before. Out with the shadow DOM, and modify the <div>’s contents
instead.
At this point the code was so far removed from the declarative way that
AlpineJS promotes that i did not see much value on using it, except for
its reactivity. But, given that this is such a small component, at the
end decided to write it all in plain JavaScript.
It is more code, at least looking only at the code i had to write, but
i love how i only have to add an is="numerus-multiselect" attribute to
HTML for it to work.
[0]: https://github.com/alpinejs/alpine/discussions/1205
[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Element/attachShadow
Had to replace the tags <ul> with a div with an input, so that the
browser can focus the keywoard there. For now i do not have a
focus-within CSS rule because we do no yet have a style for focus
highlight.
I have replaced the template for-loop to fill the options with the
JavaScript equivalent for two reasons. The first is that GoLand is very
stupid and can not handle that templating code inside the JavaScript
function and complains of non-existing problemes all the time.
The second is that, taking advantage of the input, i now have filtering
of options and have to remove accents from the label and convert it to
lowercase into a separate property just for that. I could do that with
a Go function, but it is something that i also have to do for the
input’s value when it changes, therefore i am forced to use JavaScript
and, if i am already using it for one string, it makes no sense to have
duplicate functionality in Go code.
The control still has missing aria attributes, and the list of options
is not yet navigable with the keyboard.
I had in the product edit page only because it was easier to test there
while i was developing it, but it is something that should be done for
all select[multiple], of course.
I removed the whole x-cloak thing because i am not sure what would
happen if i do something wrong and Alpine can not initialize the
multiselect; probably show nothing to the user. Now it shows the
native select a fraction of a second, but if i fuck it up at least the
user can still use the app.
I had to change the way /invoices/new and /invoices/batch are handled,
because httprouter was not happy with the new POST /invoices/:slug/edit
route, claiming that /invoices/:slug conflicts with the previously
existing routes.
I also could not make it work with the PATCH method, even though i
correctly added the patchMethod override function, therefore editing
invoices is also weird because i have to take into account the “quick”
invoice status change.
I use the same form for both new and edit invoices, because the only
changes are that we can not edit the invoice date and number, by
Oriol’s design, but must be able to change the status; very similar
forms.
I had to use a deferrable foreign key because the payment methods have
a reference to the company, and the company now a circular reference to
payment method.
This was actually the (first) reason we added the tax classes: to show
them in columns on the invoice—without the class we would need a column
for each tax rate, even though they are the same tax.
The invoice design has the product total with taxes at the last column,
above the tax base, that i am not so sure about, but it seems that it
has not brought any problem whatsoever so far, so it remains as is.
Had to reduce the invoice’s font size to give more space to the table
or the columns would be right next to each other. Oriol also told me
to add more vertical spacing to the table’s footer.
We will only allow to select a tax from each of the tax classes, but
the user needs to know what class each tax belongs to, and grouping
the taxes by class in the select helps with that.
We want to show the percentage of the tax as columns in the invoice,
but until now it was not possible to have a single VAT column when
products have different VAT (e.g., 4 % and 10 %), because, as far
as the application is concerned, these where ”different taxes”. We
also think it would be hard later on to compute the tax due to the
government.
So, tax classes is just a taxonomy to be able to have different names
and rates for the same type of tax, mostly VAT and retention in our
case.
Although it is possible to just print the invoice from the browser, many
people will not even try an assume that they can not create a PDF for
the invoice.
I thought of using Groff or TeX to create the PDF, but it would mean
maintaining two templates in two different systems (HTML and whatever i
would use), and would probably look very different, because i do not
know Groff or TeX that well.
I wish there was a way to tell the browser to print to PDF, and it can
be done, but only with the Chrome Protocol to a server-side running
Chrome instance. This works, but i would need a Chrome running as a
daemon.
I also wrote a Qt application that uses QWebEngine to print the PDF,
much like wkhtmltopdf, but with support for more recent HTML and CSS
standards. Unfortunately, Qt 6.4’s embedded Chromium does not follow
break-page-inside as well as WeasyPrint does.
To use WeasyPrint, at first i wanted to reach the same URL as the user,
passing the cookie to WeasyPrint so that i can access the same invoice
as the user, something that can be done with wkhtmltopdf, but WeasyPrint
does not have such option. I did it with a custom Python script, but
then i need to package and install that script, that is not that much
work, but using the Debian-provided script is even less work, and less
likely to drift when WeasyPrint changes API.
Also, it is unnecessary to do a network round-trip from Go to Python
back to Go, because i can already write the invoice HTML as is to
WeasyPrint’s stdin.
I am planning to use WeasyPrint to “generate PDF” from the same HTML
that the user view, but it seems that it does not support flex’s gap
and some other properties that i had to change to work in both user
agents.
I also moved the invoice’s “footer” inside the last product’s body
because i do not want the footer to be a “widow”.
Had to group name and description rows in tbody because i do not want
to break them on pagination.
I also could not use tfoot for subtotal, taxes, and total because then
they appear on every page.
The disclaimer should appear only at the very bottom of the last page,
but i do not know how to do that; using position fixed shows it on
every page.
The design calls for rendering all amounts with their currency symbol,
but golang.org/x/text’s currency package always render the symbol in
front, which is wrong in Catalan and Spanish, and a lot of other
languages.
Consulting the Internet, the most popular package for that is
accounting[0], which is almost as useless because they confuse locale
with the currency’s country of origin’s “usual locale” (e.g., en-US for
USD), which is also wrong: in Catalan i need to write USD prices as
"1.234,56 $" regardless of what Americans do.
With accounting i have the recourse of initializing the struct that
holds all the “locale” information, which is also wrong because i have
to define the decimal and thousands separators, something that depends
only on the locale, next to the currency’s precision, that is
locale-independent. But, since all CLDR data from golang.org/x/text
is inside an internal package, i can not access it and would need to
define all that information myself, which defeats the purpose of using
an external package.
Since for now i only need the format pattern for currency, i just saved
it into the database of available languages, that i do not expect to
grow too much.
[0]: https://github.com/leekchan/accounting
They are not functions because i need to join them with the main
invoice relation, and although possible is a bit more awkward with
functions.
The taxes have their own relation because i will need them grouped by
their name in the PDF, so it will probably be a select for that
relation.
jordi fita mas