Alpha Software Mobile Development Tools:   Alpha Anywhere    |   Alpha TransForm subscribe to our YouTube Channel  Follow Us on LinkedIn  Follow Us on Twitter  Follow Us on Facebook

Announcement

Collapse

The Alpha Software Forum Participation Guidelines

The Alpha Software Forum is a free forum created for Alpha Software Developer Community to ask for help, exchange ideas, and share solutions. Alpha Software strives to create an environment where all members of the community can feel safe to participate. In order to ensure the Alpha Software Forum is a place where all feel welcome, forum participants are expected to behave as follows:
  • Be professional in your conduct
  • Be kind to others
  • Be constructive when giving feedback
  • Be open to new ideas and suggestions
  • Stay on topic


Be sure all comments and threads you post are respectful. Posts that contain any of the following content will be considered a violation of your agreement as a member of the Alpha Software Forum Community and will be moderated:
  • Spam.
  • Vulgar language.
  • Quotes from private conversations without permission, including pricing and other sales related discussions.
  • Personal attacks, insults, or subtle put-downs.
  • Harassment, bullying, threatening, mocking, shaming, or deriding anyone.
  • Sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist, or otherwise discriminatory jokes and language.
  • Sexually explicit or violent material, links, or language.
  • Pirated, hacked, or copyright-infringing material.
  • Encouraging of others to engage in the above behaviors.


If a thread or post is found to contain any of the content outlined above, a moderator may choose to take one of the following actions:
  • Remove the Post or Thread - the content is removed from the forum.
  • Place the User in Moderation - all posts and new threads must be approved by a moderator before they are posted.
  • Temporarily Ban the User - user is banned from forum for a period of time.
  • Permanently Ban the User - user is permanently banned from the forum.


Moderators may also rename posts and threads if they are too generic or do not property reflect the content.

Moderators may move threads if they have been posted in the incorrect forum.

Threads/Posts questioning specific moderator decisions or actions (such as "why was a user banned?") are not allowed and will be removed.

The owners of Alpha Software Corporation (Forum Owner) reserve the right to remove, edit, move, or close any thread for any reason; or ban any forum member without notice, reason, or explanation.

Community members are encouraged to click the "Report Post" icon in the lower left of a given post if they feel the post is in violation of the rules. This will alert the Moderators to take a look.

Alpha Software Corporation may amend the guidelines from time to time and may also vary the procedures it sets out where appropriate in a particular case. Your agreement to comply with the guidelines will be deemed agreement to any changes to it.



Bonus TIPS for Successful Posting

Try a Search First
It is highly recommended that a Search be done on your topic before posting, as many questions have been answered in prior posts. As with any search engine, the shorter the search term, the more "hits" will be returned, but the more specific the search term is, the greater the relevance of those "hits". Searching for "table" might well return every message on the board while "tablesum" would greatly restrict the number of messages returned.

When you do post
First, make sure you are posting your question in the correct forum. For example, if you post an issue regarding Desktop applications on the Mobile & Browser Applications board , not only will your question not be seen by the appropriate audience, it may also be removed or relocated.

The more detail you provide about your problem or question, the more likely someone is to understand your request and be able to help. A sample database with a minimum of records (and its support files, zipped together) will make it much easier to diagnose issues with your application. Screen shots of error messages are especially helpful.

When explaining how to reproduce your problem, please be as detailed as possible. Describe every step, click-by-click and keypress-by-keypress. Otherwise when others try to duplicate your problem, they may do something slightly different and end up with different results.

A note about attachments
You may only attach one file to each message. Attachment file size is limited to 2MB. If you need to include several files, you may do so by zipping them into a single archive.

If you forgot to attach your files to your post, please do NOT create a new thread. Instead, reply to your original message and attach the file there.

When attaching screen shots, it is best to attach an image file (.BMP, .JPG, .GIF, .PNG, etc.) or a zip file of several images, as opposed to a Word document containing the screen shots. Because Word documents are prone to viruses, many message board users will not open your Word file, therefore limiting their ability to help you.

Similarly, if you are uploading a zipped archive, you should simply create a .ZIP file and not a self-extracting .EXE as many users will not run your EXE file.
See more
See less

Can a function be made to text a group of people?

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

    Can a function be made to text a group of people?

    I have a desktop application that we have been using for many years in our service department. I would like to add a function that lets me search for a group of customers and then sends them a text reminder for an upcoming service appointment. Is this possible and has anyone done it?

    Thanks,

    Chris

    #2
    Re: Can a function be made to text a group of people?

    Yes- I suspect you will need a text message service to make it go through. Different carriers have different methods to pass them on. the services can handle that part for you normally. One of my clients uses Joomla with acyba where he sends the number and message to acyba on the Joomla site and acyba sends it to the phone number. I did not set this up. The client' inhouse person did it after I built the app and got me to do a basic install of acymailer on the Joomla site.
    I am sure there are other ways to do it.
    This may help
    http://mashable.com/2008/04/19/send-.../#gDFc7Cdpeuqm
    Last edited by DaveM; 01-12-2018, 11:32 PM.
    Dave Mason
    [email protected]
    Skype is dave.mason46

    Comment


      #3
      Re: Can a function be made to text a group of people?

      Yes, sending texts can be done entirely from within Alpha, we send texts to customers all day long. There's a big HOWEVER and that's because when we enter the customer information, we collect the customer cell number and provider. With that information you can create an email that is sent as a text. Without knowing the individual cell provider for each customer you would probably need to use a third party service. I know very little about their setup.

      To send the texts as an email you need to know the format each carrier uses to accept SMS and /or MMS messages. Sometimes it's the same, sometimes not. We now default to sending MMS messages. There are various lists of carriers and formats available online to get you started. Then it's a matter of concatenating a few fields in Alpha to create the right format and using one of Alpha's email functions to actually send the emails.

      It also may depend on how much you want to put into each text, there are limits, so we keep ours short and sweet. Plus, batch sending emails like this (we are sending ours one at a time) is likely to end up with timing issues unless you put in a multi second delay between sends.
      Finian

      Comment


        #4
        Re: Can a function be made to text a group of people?

        In addition to what Dave has mentioned, your options for sending text messages are a) use a utility like Twillo to send a true txt message, called SMS or b) send the message as an 'email' using the members mobile number plus the domain provided by the carrier. For instance, if the member's mobile number was 12345 and their carrier was Verizon, the email is sent to [email protected].

        It's a bunch of work.

        Here are the most common carrier domains: www.emailtextmessages.com


        Edit: Cross-posted with Finian
        Steve Wood
        See my profile on IADN

        Comment


          #5
          Re: Can a function be made to text a group of people?

          I use twilio for individual sends by using the alpha builder and the credentials from twilio. I have not done it but I am pretty sure you could edit the function to add an array to send multiple texts one after the other.
          If anyone has done that, it would be helpful to many to see how it was done.
          NWCOPRO: Nuisance Wildlife Control Software My Application: http://www.nwcopro.com "Without forgetting, we would have no memory at all...now what was I saying?"

          Comment


            #6
            Re: Can a function be made to text a group of people?

            Having sent many emails from alpha DT, I created a query on a table, then stepped through the records one by one sending those emails to the one marked for send. It was a script I made to do that. It could be done the same way for sms. I once sent 40,000+ emails that way. It took a while to make and to send those. Due to then restrictions, I could send only 1 every 30 seconds. You can do the math to figure how long it took. My current hosting allows 500 per hour with no daily(or other) limit, so it would be faster. They are very strict on complaints, so one would need a system of permissions from the recipients before doing this.
            I have since moved it all to online. Much better for me.
            Now I just make a list of recipients and upload them to Joomla with acymailer and send from there. MUch easier and faster. Acymailer has everything built in and sms as an option here: https://www.acyba.com/acysms.html
            Dave Mason
            [email protected]
            Skype is dave.mason46

            Comment


              #7
              Re: Can a function be made to text a group of people?

              Can this be done in a phonegap app without using a 3rd party sms service?

              Comment


                #8
                Re: Can a function be made to text a group of people?

                You might be better served asking that in the web/mobile area where they have experience with phonegap.
                There can be only one.

                Comment


                  #9
                  Re: Can a function be made to text a group of people?

                  Oops, I just entered a search for this question in the forum and didn't check to see where the answers were coming from.

                  Comment


                    #10
                    Re: Can a function be made to text a group of people?

                    I took a look at acyba and another named twilio. I am not a programmer by trade. Is there anyone out there that has done this and has code set up? If not anyone out there I could hire to create this for me? I'm sure it's simple enough for someone who knows how.
                    Last edited by cdibi; 02-06-2018, 11:38 AM.

                    Comment


                      #11
                      Re: Can a function be made to text a group of people?

                      You might be better served asking that in the web/mobile area.
                      There can be only one.

                      Comment

                      Working...
                      X