Please advise on how to create an invoice system

i'm trying to create an asp webform for my own development. I'm trying to create an online invoice where people can enter details like "Customer Name, Address, Date, Total amount".

I'm able to create a webform which captures those details and insert/delete/delete to/from a mssql db.

But because each invoice should have some items, so i created another table (InvoiceDetails) which reference to the Invoice table. So i can create as many items as i want in each invoice.

How should i create webforms for the invoicedetails? Because i need to add dynamically and not fix 10 records to add/edit in the form. THus most probably i'll need to put all sql statements into 1 transaction in case 1 InvoiceDetail record fail, so i can rollback the Invoice and InvoiceDetail record.

are there any samples which has a similar scenario as me?Its an interesting scenario Michael, especially the cardinality of relationship & dynamic nature of this application. If formatting doesn't matter much at data-entry level, you can use editable datagrid to insert/edit/delete data. This will totally accomodate the dynamic nature of InvoiceDetails using this strong data-aware component in ASP.NET. However, for printing & display in invoice report format, you may need to postion the dynamic controls on the fly which may get difficult if positions need customized.

MSDN's article "Adding Controls to a Web Forms Page Programmatically" may help.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/vbcon/html/vbtskaddingcontrolstowebformspageprogrammatically.asp?frame=true

I hope it helps.

-Adnan Masood
This is a job for a new application model. HTML sucks for this stuff. Imagine writing an ERP application for the Web.. Wait Oracle did it.. sort of.

You will probably want to employ some thrd party web controls from the folks at Infragistics. Adding detail lines to invoices without them will be a little kludgy.

I did it once and ended up doing it with a series of frames. A button on the header page took you to a detail page. After adding the data on the detail page you went back to the header. It was a lot of tedious work.
Hmm, I would have a form that adds a single item to the order. Then two buttons, one says "Add another item" and one says "Finish Order". Add another item just reloads the form and Finish Order goes to whatever the next step is.

For editing just use a datalist that binds to the order number.

I do a similar type system for magazine advertising rates for each year. A particular magazine can have 10 years worth of prices and each year can have 20 different rates (for various sizes). The datalist shows all 10 years (queried by the magazine ID) and when they select the edit button it changes all the prices into textboxes for that year only. So your datalist would show all items for a single order, and then allow editing of each individual item inside that order.
hmm... datalist.. but what if its a new invoice? Thus it will not be given a Invoice ID until its inserted into the database. So its kinda hard to bind the individual items to that invoice

thats why i'm asking for advise on whats the best practise for people who has done similar development..
While you are entering the invoice keep the database in some temp tables. Identify the record with a GUID.. after you are done editing copy that data from the temp tables into the production tables. This works well and requires no whacky state management. It depends on the level of sophistication you want. In my current business we don;t start out by entering an order/invoice. We enter contracts the contracts get attached to jobs and several people may be involved with entering the data about the contracts and jobs. As the work on the contract proceeds incremental invoices are issued.