Frontend Mentor - Invoice app solution

This is a solution to the Invoice app challenge on Frontend Mentor Frontend Mentor challenges help you improve your coding skills by building realistic projects.

Table of contents

• Overview
  • The challenge
  • Screenshot
  • Links
• My process
  • Built with
  • What I learned
  • Continued development
  • Useful resources
• Author

Overview

This invoicing web application will users to create invoice and print it locally additionally they'll be able to manage their invoices

The challenge

Users should be able to:

• Create, read, update, and delete invoices
• Receive form validations when trying to create/edit an invoice
• Save draft invoices, and mark pending invoices as paid
• Filter invoices by status (draft/pending/paid)
• Toggle light and dark mode
• View the optimal layout for the app depending on their device's screen size
• See hover states for all interactive elements on the page - A step is submitted, but no selection has been made
• Keep track of any changes, even after refreshing the browser

Screenshot

Links

• Solution URL: The github Repository
• Live Site URL: github page

My process

Built with

• Semantic HTML5 markup
• CSS Print
• Flexbox
• CSS Grid
• Mobile-first workflow
• DOM Scripting with javascript

What I learned

In most cases it is important to use interactive elements rather than using non-interactive elements and adding the tabindex attribute

<!-- Don't do this -->
<div tabindex="0"></div>

<!-- Instead do this -->
<button></button>

In css we can style a web page for printing purposes which can enable us to directly print our invoice in the browser

//to define the page size when printed
@page {
    size: A4;
}

In javascript we can communicate we a script running in a different thread thanks to MessageChannel

    const worker = new Worker();
    const channel = new MessageChannel();
    //initialize the communication (The worker will be able to send message with the port2)
    worker.postMessage(
            "message port sent",
            "*",
            [channel.port2]
    );

    //listen to messages sent by the worker
    channel.port1.onmessage = function (message) {
        console.log(message);
    }

    //send data to the worker
    channel.port1.postMessage(data);
}

Continued development

We can still improve the project with the following features:

• setup user preferences(currency, print layout, etc)
• add service worker to improve performance
• setup the server to be able to use the app anywhere

Useful resources

• Mozilla developer network - This is where I usually go when looking for documentation even though for more in-depth knowledge I recommend reading the specifications

Author

• Website - Ndimah Tchougoua
• Frontend Mentor - @jay-ike