Custom Forms #

The number-one reason people customize PhreeForm is branded documents — your logo,
your layout, your terms on the invoice. You don’t start from a blank page and you
don’t need developer skills: copy a built-in form, tweak it, save it under a new
name. This page covers that flow, how forms attach to journals, moving forms between
installs, and what to check if a form renders wrong after the 7.3.9 PDF change.

Start from a built-in #

Never edit a shipped form directly — copy it first:

1. Open the form list and pick the built-in closest to what you want (e.g. the
   stock sales invoice).
2. Copy it. This duplicates the whole definition under a new title, leaving the
   original intact (your fallback).
3. Edit the copy in the designer — drop in your logo,
   adjust columns, add terms text.
4. Save. Your version now appears alongside the built-in for that document type.

Keep the original built-in untouched. If your custom form ever breaks, you can
copy the built-in again and re-apply your changes.

Form groups #

Every form/report has a group_id that decides where it shows up. The format is
module:context. When you print from a transaction, Bizuno offers the forms whose
group matches that journal (via getDefaultFormID()):

Plus non-journal groups for statements (cust:stmt, vend:stmt), labels
(cust:lblc, vend:lblv), letters (cust:ltr, vend:ltr), returns (cust:rtn),
work-order forms (mfg:wo), and reports (gl:rpt, inv:rpt, mfg:rpt, hr:rpt,
ship:rpt, misc:rpt). Keep a custom form in the same group as the built-in you
copied so it’s offered in the right place.

Choosing which form prints #

When a journal has more than one form in its group, you pick at print time. There is
a default form per document type (the group’s default), so the common case is
one click.

No per-customer default form. A frequent expectation is “assign customer X
their own invoice template.” Bizuno core does not have a per-customer
default-form override — forms default by document type/group, not by contact.
(There is a user-level bookmark mechanism for reports, which is a different
thing.) If you genuinely need per-customer templates, that’s a customization, not
a setting — most shops instead make a multi-language or multi-brand form and
select it at print time.

Multi-language and multi-brand variants #

Because forms are just definitions in a group, the practical pattern for “different
look for different situations” is multiple forms in the same group — e.g. an
English and a French invoice, or two brands’ letterheads — and you choose the right
one when you print. Each is a copy with its own text fields and logo.

Export / import #

Forms move between installs as JSON:

• Export a form to download its definition as a .json file. (Export resets its
  access to “all users/roles” so it’s portable.)
• Import a .json file (or one of the shipped definitions in
  locale/<lang>/reports/) to create the form here, optionally renaming it or
  replacing an existing one of the same name.

This is how you develop a form on one site and roll it to others.

Troubleshooting after 7.3.9 #

The 7.3.9 move to tFPDF (from TCPDF) is mostly invisible, but if a custom form
looks off after upgrading, check these:

• HTML in a cell isn’t rendering. Only a small tag set is supported by the
  in-tree shim: <b>/<strong>, <i>/<em>, <u>, <font color="…">, and
  <p>/<div>/<br> as line breaks. Richer HTML (tables, styles, lists) won’t
  render — simplify the markup. Unsupported tags are stripped but their text is
  kept.
• A barcode is blank or wrong. Barcodes now come from
  picqer/php-barcode-generator. Make sure the field’s symbology is one of the
  supported types (C128/A/B/C, C39, EAN-13/8, UPC-A/E, Interleaved 2-of-5, POSTNET)
  and that the data is valid for that symbology (e.g. EAN-13 needs the right digit
  count).
• A logo/image shows a red placeholder. The image file isn’t found under the
  data images/ folder — re-upload it or fix the Img field’s file path.
• Fonts look different. tFPDF uses its own font set; a font referenced by an old
  TCPDF-era form may fall back. Re-pick a standard font on the affected fields.

For deeper PDF issues, see
PDF rendering issues.

Related #

• Form designer — building the layout
• Report engine overview — the 7.3.9 migration in context
• PDF rendering issues