Re: Help Needed!

On Sun, 17 Sep 2000 11:17:42 +0100, Mark Carpenter wrote:
>I have created a website using shopfactory software. I receive Ecommerce
>orders via Email. Can anyone tell me if there is a way to transfer the data
>received from the Email into a data base, so that I can avoid having to
>manually transfer the data.
>Any help would be gratefully appreciated.
>
>Mark

Well, the answer is a qualified "yes". I say qualified because it depends, to the best of my limited knowledge, on what database you're using and what email package. I've never heard of "shopfactory", but I'd bet that it runs on Windows (bleech - Linux fan here!). If this is true, then I should think that you could use a "scripting language" such as VBA to "read" the email and put the information into your database. This assumes that the email is properly structured so that you can look for "static" words followed by the actual information. You'd then extract this information into variables and then connect to your database to do an INSERT type command. Exactly how you would do this is beyond me mainly because I'm not really very Windows literate.

On a Linux (or other UNIX like system), you'd do something similiar. Most likely with Perl or Python to do the scripting. Again, I can't be specific due to lack of information. What system are you running? What MTA (sendmail, qmail, something else)? Does your MTA allow you to use ProcMail as an LDA ( Local Delivery Agent)? If so, then you can set up ProcMail to run a script against your email message. Again, this script would need to be able to use some sort of logic such as finding "static" words to be able to gather up the variable information, then do a database INSERT operation. Also, which database are you running? There may or may not be any Perl or Python bindings to that specific database (I know that there are to MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Oracle, perhaps more).

Well, this really wasn't all that helpful in regards to specifics, but perhaps it has given you some hope and pointed you in the general direction.

John Received on Mon Sep 18 2000 - 04:46:38 CEST