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Frustrated with sending e-mail.

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    Frustrated with sending e-mail.

    I have an application that has been working for years with sending plain text e-mails in A5v5. Today I decided to do something really stupid and try sending an HTML letter in v9.

    I copied the app to v9, created the body text in HTML which looked fine in a browser. I then used email_client() so I could preview the results and it looks perfect in the preview. Then came the big mistake - I pushed the Send button.

    1. Something flashed on the screen and I eventually saw that it was a message saying something about updating the a_email_outbox file to the new version. BUT, I can't find any a_email_outbox associated with A5v9. I can find one in A5v5 and one in A5v8 but neither were attached to my v9 app. (I seem to recall something about moving the outbox but I can't find anything in the Help file or in the Release Notes about it so maybe it's just my imagination.)

    2. Shortly after "something flashed on the screen" I got an error message that said it can't find the Violated.MDX file. First, what the heck is v9 doing looking for and MDX file? Second, since A5v9 is creating the bloody Violated table, why can't it create its own MDX file?

    3. I created a CDX file and renamed it to MDX and then got a message that it couldn't find the "temporary_table.DDD" file even though Windows Explorer can find it very easily and it's exactly where A5 was looking for it.

    4. After many "failed" attempts at sending an HTML e-mail I decided to try just sending a plain text e-mail from A5v9. SAME PROBLEMS!

    5. After many "failed" attempts now at sending both HTML and plain text e-mails, I made the silly mistake of looking at my regular e-mail inbox. Guess what - all those "failed" e-mails where actually send and went through just as they should have.

    Anybody have any clue as to what is causing all these error messages when it otherwise appears to be working as it should?

    A bit later - YES! I have a clue. I discovered that I had forgotten to set up an e-mail profile! Now why couldn't Alpha have figured that out and told me that instead of giving me all those wierd messages that just wasted a few hours of my time? And why did it send the e-mails anyway if there was nothing in the default profile? (I did have two other profiles but this app shouldn't have known anything about them. And, if it did, why didn't they work right for this app when they work fine in the other app?)

    Yes, I should probably have deleted this but maybe it will keep someone else from wasting so much time and "enjoying" so much frustration.

    #2
    Re: Frustrated with sending e-mail.

    Hi Cal,

    I tried to see if I could find any info that addresses your problem. The only code in Alpha Five that I could find was a Script called "email_view_outbox"

    This references a test for existence of the file
    A5_GetApplicationDataFilename("a_email_outbox.dbf")
    and then reports an error
    ui_msg_box("Error","The E-mail outbox does not exist.",16)
    This illustrates a couple of issues that any Alpha coder should handle in their code.
    1. The error says the file does not exist, but should say what file (with it's full path listed) does not exist in the error message. Error messages should contain all relevant info to the failure, unless you don't want the user to know about the details,
    2. If the file does not exist, the code could either automatically, or with user prompting, solve the problem, in this case by creating a new, default file and continue
    While it is not always possible to do the 2nd one, as it may not be clear as to how to proceed after an error, detailed error messages should always be present, or at worst, try to report error code, error lines etc in your error handlers so that the error can eventually be tracked back and repaired.
    Regards,

    Ira J. Perlow
    Computer Systems Design


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