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NetTalk Web Server => Web Server - Ask For Help => Topic started by: springguy on April 02, 2013, 06:49:46 PM

Title: Mail Merge with Word
Post by: springguy on April 02, 2013, 06:49:46 PM

I have a request to generate a mailmerge into a Word document and present the resulting merged document as a PDF.  I think I could do that with Office Inside - haven't tried yet with NetTalk.

However, the challenge as I see it is that the customer wants the Word document to have some basic merge fields into text AND then on the following page to have a variable number of transactions from a database.  It would be like generating a Word merge for the first page and a Clarion report for the second page.  Doing it all as a Word merge would be great, but I don't see how you can merge to a variable number of rows, so I was thinking a second page that is a Clarion report would be the way to get the variable rows of data.

Customer wants to use Word (if possible) as the document source because of a lot of graphics that are changed from mailing to mailing embeded in the document as well as fonts etc.  If the variable number of transactions (rows of data) has to be a Clarion report, that would be OK because the basic formatting of it would be fairly straightforward.  But, if there is a way to merge a variable number of rows into a Word document, that would be great.

Anybody have experience with something like this in a NetTalk Web server environment?  Using Office Inside or another technique?

Thanks,
Mike Springer

Title: Re: Mail Merge with Word
Post by: kevin plummer on April 03, 2013, 03:05:09 AM

Hi Mike,

the web server environment is not going to be the problem. If you can get this working in a windows app you can get it working on the web.

I use Office Inside a lot in win and web but mainly the Excel Object. Without seeing the doc, it sounds like page 1 is just mail merge and page 2 is using OI to write rows of data not a clarion report. Sendto from Capesoft is a good example of wriring rows of data to numerous formats including Office using OI. If you already have OI then I would just play around with one of their demo's to get the effect you are looking for.

HTH's

Kevin

Title: Re: Mail Merge with Word
Post by: springguy on April 03, 2013, 12:03:37 PM

Thanks Kevin,
I do have OI, and will play with SendTo integrating into OI for the second page - good idea.
Thanks,
Mike

Title: Re: Mail Merge with Word
Post by: kevin plummer on April 03, 2013, 02:44:37 PM

sendto won't work with NT it was just the concept of what sendto does using OI that you could also do in code for word for your project.