how to capture "letters"

[martinwcole]

customer needs to send letters to clients with certain characteristics (no problem)

could be Alpha letter, Word.doc or pdf - but for legal reasons must capture and save the actual letter and be able to reproduce for auditors. (How to do this??)

Does anyone have an idea of how to do this?

[Tom Cone Jr]

RE: how to capture

Martin,

How about saving them as pdf files?

Sounds as though you'll need to build an archive indexing scheme that will enable the user to retrieve a particular image on demand, too.

While this could be built using Alpha Five, it might be worthwhile to 'shop' for commercial document management systems that are already 'out there'.

-- tom

[Peter Lear]

RE: how to capture

Could the letters not be scanned in and saved as (say) bitmap files. They could then be held in table and reproduced as the original -or would that not meet your needs?

Rev Peter Lear

[Peter.Wayne]

RE: how to capture

If the letters can be Alpha letters, why not just save them in memo fields? That's what I do. I make the record read-only after it's been finalized, so no one can edit it or delete it afterwards (at least, not without access to the A5 Control Panel).

[John Lemisch]

RE: how to capture

We do all our letters in Word, so I created a table with the basic info I want about the letter and included is a field for the letter name (full path & name). This field is a "file select" (properties). I then have buttons on the form to either print or email. In either case, it selects the appropriate letter/doc file and prints, or attaches it to the email.

[martinwcole]

RE: how to capture

Well, I left out the key word - "Automatically"

In other words, say we have a batch of 25 letters we are going to mail - I need to be able to push a button that would PRINT the letters but also SAVE a copy of the actual letter, as well.

Dr. Wayne's idea is ideal, as the customer had been doing it with Alpha/DOS with Alpha letters, and I noticed that they are now saving a copy in a memo field, with Alpha4/DOS, in a separate table for the letters, indexed back to clients.

But I'm not sure where to start with Alpha5. If there were a fixed number of letters, and they were static, then I could easily do it by getting the data in pieces and glueing it all into one variable and the writing that to a memo field. But if the customer wants to change the letter, or add one, then I would have to go back into the script for every change he made.


I have looked at letter "events", and explorer for a letter, and tested several of same, but it looks like that would be a difficult way to proceed.

Was hoping maybe someone had run into this before.

[RupertP]

RE: how to capture

Martin,
I currently have a document that my customer needs to keep an archived copy. The process onlt requires a couple of clicks. I set the document (report) to print to a specific printer. The defined printer is Scansoft's Paperport software. When A5 prints to Paperport, it opens the Paperport application to insert the documents. Once the "batch" is completed, the customer simply highlights the batch and clicks on the printer icon. This prints all letters in the batch.

Paperport ver. 9 saves the documents as PDF which doesn't consume a lot of disk space. Additonally, once the indexing process is done, they can search for text in a document.

Rupert

[martinwcole]

RE: how to capture

Thanks Rupert.

I have been experimenting with Alpha letters, which are RTF and an RTF memo field in a table and the events/explorer properties for same, but the fare is very limited.

[martinwcole]

RE: how to capture

here is a script that prints a letter, saves it as a PDF, and renames the PDF for the report name needs. Its practical application is that the client MUST have an exact copy of the letter saved on the computer - for legal reasons. (The report data and/or the 'form letter' could be changed in the future, preventing an exact reprinting copy of the letter.) This does it all in one operation, automatically.

it is run from a form where the parent is the same table the report is printed from


on error goto errors
dim global rnum as n
dim n as n 'testing var
n=55 'arbitrary for testing
if file.exists(a5.get_path() + "\letters.pdf")
file.remove(a5.get_path() + "\letters.pdf")
end if
rnum=table.current().recno()
report.preview("letters")
report.saveas("letters","pdf") 'recno()=var->rnum is filter for report
filename=a5.get_path() + "\letters.pdf"
n=n+1
'set the uniquename from customer info
'n is a testing variable only
newfile=a5.get_path() + "\letters" + alltrim(str(n) + ".pdf")
file.rename(filename,newfile)
end
errors:
err_msg = error_text_get(error_code_get())
err_numb=error_code_get()
line = error_line_number_get()
script = error_script_get()
ui_msg_box("Error", err_msg+" Error occurred at line "+alltrim(str(line,4,0))+ " in script: "+script)
end