[AccessD] HTML Email from Access - Progress

Your suggestions and analysis are very provocative. I wonder if your notion
can be abstracted to (in pseudo-code) 
 
    htmlbody = GetFile(  <http://www.myplace.com/blablabla.htm>
http://www.myplace.com/blablabla.htm )
 
which (in language x) would read in said file and assign the string to
htmlbody. Grabbing it from the site would guarantee that all references to
pictures, frames, etc. would be resolved correctly. The text could contain
\\markers\\ and the code could do Replace()s on them, giving you dynamic
text plus pictures &c. Assuming the product table had a picture reference,
couldn't you even plug that in?
 
Hmmm. Interesting experiments to perform. 
 
And while I'm on the recursion thing, why not store all the html as
varchar() columns in a sql database. Instead of literal filenames strewn
throughout the code there could be a PK into the table, load the html and
resolve it. IOW, why not store the site itself in the db, rather than merely
populating pages with sql selects &c? Come to think of it, I recall that's
what Sybase PowerDynamo tries to do. Why hasn't the idea caught on? Are
there obvious drawbacks that I'm missing?
 
Arthur
 
 -----Original Message-----
From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com
[mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Andy Lacey
Sent: July 30, 2003 3:31 PM
To: 'Access Developers discussion and problem solving'
Subject: RE: [AccessD] HTML Email from Access - Progress



Actually Brett has mentioned the key part of this. Everyone else may have
realised, but I didn't, that you need to use Outlook's .HTMLBody rather than
.Body. After that a lot of this becomes straightforward-ish. I should be
able to read any html file (created by Frontpage, Dreamweaver or whatever) a
line at a time, buld up a string and set .HTMLBody to that string. At the
same time I can use Arthur's suggestion for merging data in.
 
As for pictures maybe they have to be on the web. I looked at the source of
an html emailshot I got and the pics in there referenced their web-site. And
I think Brett's suggestion below would too. Surely all it's embedding is a
link to a file that has to be available to the recipient. N'est-ce pas? I
did the following. I set strPicPath to a file on my machine, sent the email
to myself and it displayed fine - but if I then renamed the file locally all
the email shows is a placeholder, whether or not the file was also sent as
an attachment. So it does have to be availbale to the recipient. Or am I
missing something Brett?
 
Andy Lacey
http://www.minstersystems.co.uk <http://www.minstersystems.co.uk/>  

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