Re: Sending e-mail from Forms 5.0

In article <34D1E3AD.CF6D898E_at_americasm01.nt.com>,   "Adrian G. Klingel" <klingela_at_americasm01.nt.com> wrote:
>
> Got any ideas on how to do this? I'm storing e-mail addresses in the
> database, and I already know I can write to a text file. I'm using MS
> Exchange for e-mail, which seems to be pretty limited at the command
> line. I can spawn Exchange from a button in my form, and it will come
> up with a new message containing the text from the text file I wrote to,
> but I don't know how to put the address in the address block. Is this
> something I'll have to do on the server side, like a cron job or
> something? Like I could write a job that runs a SQL*Plus report, spools
> the data to the file, then mails it automatically to a person of my
> choosing. Please comment on my plans, or shoot them down, or whatever.
> If you've done this before, please help!
>
> Have a good one,
> Adrian Klingel
> Consultant

Dear Adrian,

if You only uses a solution that works with windows and exchange (or any other mapi-compatible mailer), You could use the mapi(32).dll (Mail-API) or - perhaps easier - a mapi-vbx / ocx like that from VisualBasic. This API allows you to use functions/methods to create messages, filling the adress-block etc. If You are using Forms5 only (not 4.5), it would be much simpler to use a mapi.ocx instead of ORA_FFI-Calls to the DLL.

Another solution - a better one for powerful automatic mailers - is to write a simple program in C or VB on a NT-Server (for example), wich listen on a db-pipe (OK, only for remote-dbms), create a table (usable as a post-office) with a trigger wich writes to this db-pipe if any row is inserted. Now if You insert a row in this table (which should use a CC-column, a TO-column a SUBJECT-column and so on), the NT-program reads this "message" through the pipe and generates a mapi-message (yes, mapi again) for the NT-Exchange-client. If neccesary, You can add very flexible services to this solution by programming stored-functions. We had very good experiences with this method.

Hope this would help a little,

Kind Regards,

Peter Welker

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