Transcript Send Automated Mail and Email from EX

SEND AUTOMATED MAIL
AND EMAIL FROM EX
Ye Olde-Timey Proceffe Automationne
Section the First
HOW A MAIL MERGE
IS DONE
(WITHIN JENZABAR EX)
An EX merge always starts with a Notepad
action attached to an individual…
…that’s connected to a Merge Document
definition. A Daily Procedure must be run to
execute the Notepad action in question.
The definition can be a “LETTER”, in which case the
merge will be performed in Microsoft Word and can be
sent out as either a physical letter or an email from the
individual running the merge…
…or an “EMAIL,” in which case the merge will be performed
by EX’s Scheduler service and sent out over SMTP as a
HTML email. EMAIL actions can have their recipients,
subjects, and senders customized using fields in the merge’s
data sourcs; LETTER actions cannot.
Infomaker must be used to create the data
source in either case. The format for EMAIL
sources is particularly fiddly.
Five things I’ve learned about the
EMAIL data source:
 Don't use CAST statements, as the system looks for 'AS' strings to identify field
names. Use CONVERT instead.
 Don't capitalize any of your 'AS' statements. Also, don't attempt to alias a table or
field without using 'as.'
 The name of the fields in the XML template in Infomaker will determine the name
of the fields in the data file.
 The name of the fields in the data file must match exactly to the name of the fields in
the merge doc. And it's case-sensitive.
 You must have the new_merge_id_file table in your query, and it must be referenced
directly, unaliased.
In a Word merge, you can use IF fields to perform
simple text substitutions based on logical criteria and
format your data in specific ways (i.e. dates, number
formats, etc.)
In an EMAIL merge, you have to insert custom text and
perform all other logical operations and text formatting
in the query, via calculated fields with CASE statements
and/or text formats using CONVERT().
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