FExplorer: legal invoice integrations for Microsoft Windows Explorer

Since legal invoicing became mandatory for every company in Italy (2019) many Italian people had to start handling XML files containing invoice data.

Many viewers are already available to browse invoice files yet still the activity may become very time-consuming and far from trivial for the regular user. In particular, some people (accountants or managers) may find themself spending much effort dealing with this supposed-to-be digital innovation step.

This is the reason we (me and Carlo Barazzetta) started FExplorer project, based on a previous work of Carlo about SVG files (XML again) link to GitHub repo, link to a Delphi Live Italia 2021 webinar replay (Italian only) .

Briefly, we can say FExplorer integrates with Windows’ shell (Windows Explorer) adding the following capabilities to the end user:

• Preview box, showing an HTML rendering of the underlying XML document
• Custom icons, each XML file will be provided with a custom-generated icon with all essential data exposed (date, document number, creditor, debtor, total…)
• Dedicated editor

Version 1.0 of FExplorer has been released and it is available at the following GitHub link.

To ease access to the final user, a precompiled setup is also available at this link.

Today (April 15th, 2021) me and Carlo joined a webinar about Legal Invoicing services by OSItalia s.r.l. and we had a chance to briefly showcase the project. Here you can find slides used for the presentation (Italian only):

I am excited this idea of re-using Carlo’s SVG-related integrations to the legal invoicing file format actually materialized into this project!

Even if it is still at a prototypal stage, basic functionalities are already there and we can see much room for improvements.

Once again, Embarcadero Delphi proved to be the perfect development environment to build this project in a blink of an eye!

We will be happy to receive your feedback about FExplorer, feel free to drop a line by email, comment here or open a discussion on the GitHub repository.

Stay tuned!

Andrea