How to print record(s) and update fields at the same time?

Question

I have a requirement that involves Printing a "document(s)" and then updating it to mark it as printed (custom "isPrinted" field).

I am really struggling to find the best way to do this. I've thought of a of different ways but they all seem to fall down at one stage or another:

• Exporting from Salesforce as a report/dataloader and loading into a Mail Merge before then using another update to update the system of the printed records
• 2 visualforce pages, 1 as a Mass Update and 1 to render all records to be printed as a PDF

The issue with these is the printing and updating are seperate process and as we are dealing with hundreds/thousands of records/print outs I need it to be seamless. At the moment I am picturing one PDF but I also see the benefit of simply producing a PDF for each record that is to be printed/updated.

Has anyone else been required to do this, how did you achieve it?

Answer 1

I have done something like this. In my case it involves a VF page with a table of printable items (records from an object Printable__c). Each row has a checkbox, after selecting one or more items from the table, by pressing a button a single PDF was generated and saved as an attachment to a separate object (Print_Out__c). After the PDF is generated and saved, the records in the Printable__c table are updated so they will no longer show up in the list. You could even keep track of the Print_Out__c object that they were added to.