Question

I’m currently on the task of developing a Sales/CRM application on MVC3.
Since lots of opperations revolve around a given order (that can ve saved and later used) I was wondering some questions.

1. I want tabs for a quote for the customer and an internal order view. How can i handle the behaviour so when a client opens a given order he/she can stay within the same order?
2. The Order has information to generate various other Excel documents (like supplier invoices and shipping orders) I need to implement a way to “fill up” those forms. The forms are in Excel format, is there any way to “fill” an excel from a C# application and then generate the file?

Thank you.

Answer 1

The first question sounds like a problem of persistence. You can use sessions to persist data across pages. For example, if you have some sort of Order class you can create a new Order when the customer does something that requires it:

\\ first use:
var order = new Order();
order.Details = "Blah blah blah";
Session["Order"] = order;

Later on, you can obtain it using the same mechanism:

\\ You should check if this exists first
var order = (Order) Session["Order"];
order.SomethingUseful();    

Personally, I write some wrappers around the Session to make it strongly typed and so I can unit test it properly. Something along the lines of:

interface ISessionWrapper
{
    Order Order { get; set; }
}

Then I can implement it as:

    public Order Order { get; set; }
    {
        get { return (Session["Order"] ?? Session["Order"] = new Order()); }
        set { Session["Order"] = value; }
    }

in some concrete class. It becomes easy to mock and unit test as well.