Is there a way to send a mail with different PDF file to different contacts using file maker?
I am aware of sending batch emails with one attachment but I would like to send a personalize PDF for each contact which seems not so simple.
Also
Can I add PDF files to the table itself or would I have to use the path to the file?
Example:
Table 1
**Name** [James Brown] [James Blue]
**Email** [brown.j#gmail.com] [blue.j#gmail.com]
**PDFfileAttchamnet** [folder/PDF/JamesBrown.pdf] [folder/PDF/JamesBlue.pdf]
So an Email for James Brown would look like:
Dear James Brown, please see the attached file.
Attachment [JamesBrown.pdf] {actual file}
and
Dear James Blue, please see the attached file.
Attachment [JamesBlue.pdf] {actual file}
I think you can solve it by creating container field in you database and import the pdfs in it.
then you can use export Field Contents[] to export it and send it by email
Hope it useful
I would like to send a personalize PDF for each contact which seems
not so simple.
Find the records of contacts you want to include and loop among them, sending mail to each one individually (i.e. without selecting the 'Collect addresses across found set' option).
Can I add PDF files to the table itself or would I have to use the
path to the file?
You can do either, it's up to you. If the path to the file can be calculated (as in your example), you can calculate it right there in the Send Mail script step.
Note that you can also generate the PDF files during the process itself.
Do I understand correctly that you would actually like to personalize the PDF document(s)?
This is possible, maybe not very simple, but quite simple. The trick is to prepare the PDF as a form, and then fill the form fields to personalize.
PDF has a native forms data format (called FDF), which is described in ISO 32000 (as well as the older PDF specification documents provided by Adobe, as you can find in the Acrobat SDK, downloadable from the Adobe website).
FDF is a simple structured text file, which can easily be assembled using FileMaker (I have done that routinely for several catalog projects). The easiest way to get going is to open the form in Acrobat, fill in the fields, and then export the data as FDF. This gives you the pattern to "fill in the blanks".
So, you create the FDF files using Filemaker. With them you can fill the blank form and feed the saved document to the eMail system.
Which tool to use to fill the blank form depends on the volume you have to process. Acrobat is not very powerful (and you may end up in a bit of a legal gray zone, because Acrobat is not set up for being used as a service). There are applications which are made specifically for filling out forms on a server (such as FDFMerge by Appligent), or there are also several libraries which have the tools to fill out forms (iText or pdflib come to my mind). These applications also allow you to flatten the PDF, which means that there are no longer form fields, but their contents becomes part of the base.
The resulting file can now be either made to an eMail attachment, or you make it available on a server and send an eMail with the link to the file (which method you will use may depend on security and privacy regulations).
Related
i am writing a web application with React, where users can write protocolls for their appointments. The current system is: the web application saves the word file in the local file system, the user edits it and uploads it via a macro in word.
That seems a bit clunky to me and i am not so sure about the security issues of letting the browser directly access the local file system.
So i wanted to let the users edit the files directly via the browser, with an editor similar to GoogleDocs.
Problem is:
Documents have to remain on premis
Converting doc files to a format that can be displayed in a browser and back seems to have some formating issues.
The user must be able to download the file and edit it, in case they have an appointment without internet access and upload it later. So it has to be at least convertable to a document that can be easily edited in Word.
There are so many richtext editor, but from what ive seen none is designed for that use-case. So my question is: Is what i want to do even possible, and if so does anyone know a good editor or library for doing so?
Not a Lotus Notes Developer but have to get data in a Lotus Notes database into SharePoint. All of the LN entries have attachments. I tried to export to a csv file but that doesn't include the attachments. I think created a new view with the Attachments field but that only returns the number of attachments. How can I extract the associated attachments with each LN form. Thanks in advance
Your question is pretty broad. Attachments are (sometimes) treated as embedded objects in a Rich Text Field. This URL has some sample code:
https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/en/SSVRGU_9.0.1/basic/H_EXAMPLES_EMBEDDEDOBJECTS_PROPERTY_RTITEM.html
Copy/paste may not work for you because the attachments may not be in a field called "Body" or there may be multiple "Body" fields on the document (which requires other considerations beyond the scope of this question), or the attachment may be embedded objects in the document. Or all the of the above. That that code will give you a sense of what you need to do.
Also, see this:
How to retrieve Lotus Notes attachments?
I have done this by writing LotusScript code to detach all the attachments from all docs into a single folder, using the document's UNID plus the attachment name for the filename in the folder. Adding the UNID covers cases where attachments with the same name exist in mulitple documents and might actually have different content. I do not attempt to de-duplicate.
The agent adds a NotesItem to each document giving the filename(s) of the detached attachment(s).
I then create a view containing all the fields that I want to export, including the new field with the filenames. I export that view to CSV. I hand the CSV and a zip file containing the attachments over to the SharePoint team.
Maybe a bit late but... I do have extensive experience (approx. 15 years) with data extraction from IBM Notes applications/databases - independent of the type of application - and have supported migrations of quite a few large IBM Notes applications to various targets for companies around the world.
You can access IBM Notes databases using the native C-API, LotusScript, COM or Java, for example or make a document available for further processing by exporting it to Domino XML (DXL) format.
The C-API is the foundation of IBM Notes, meaning that COM and Java APIs only offer a subset of the C-API's functionality. Any of the APIs should give you the ability to extract a document's metadata and attachments. However:
A document, including it's attachment, can be encrypted using an IBM Notes ID. If you do not have access to the ID that was used to encrypt the document, you will neither be able to extract the document nor the attachment.
Attachments can be "real attachments" or so called "embedded objects". Depending on the type of attachment, the attachment needs to be handled differently if it comes to the API calls required to do the export.
Attachments can be compressed. In most cases, the API should handle the decompression transparently. However, there is at least one proprietary compression algorithm (based on Hufman) that is widely used. If you extract documents in DXL format, you will not be able to read those attachments, as they are embedded into the DXL in compressed form.
Objects being embedded into a document using (Object Linking and Embeddeding (OLE)) cannot be extracted using the COM or Java API. I.e. even if you gain access to the documents, you will not be able to transform them into a readable format.
If the information you are trying to transfer from IBM Notes to SharePoint is important to the company you work for, I would recommend to rely on a proven solution for the export/migration rather than developing this on your own, as the details can really be tricky.
Should you have any further questions, don't hesitate to get in touch.
I get 15+ PDF's a day that I have to enter into a database. They are generated from a table where the "Blanks" are filled in from specific table fields. Any tools or python code examples I could use to try and develop a means of extracting the data from the PDF to either write to or create a table to import to the database table? The Database is currently Access mdb.
Thanks
There are a number of approaches that will work.
One simple approach is to simply print the PDF file out to a text file and then have Access import that text. All recent versions of windows allow you to install a “text” printer that outputs the printing of a document to a text file. You can have access “process” a folder of pdfs, print them to text and then import those text files. You might need some VBA to remove “pages” and some extra lines before you import the data into Access.
Another approach is to use Word (Automate from Access) to open a PDF. When word opens a pdf, it converts it to a word document. This approach will even format rows as a word table. You can then pluck out that table data and send that data to word. You can likely pull that text out without writing the data out to a text file – or just use Words “save-as” to a text file (you can automate this process from Access).
Another approach is to use the free Ghost Script library that can extract text from a PDF (this I would consider if did not have word at your disposal).
So which solution is best will much depend on the current software you going to have installed on the computer running Access. Opening the pdf files with word would be my first choice and test.
At my old job we used Cogniview which converted PDF to Excel spreadsheets quite quickly. If you want to use Python, a quick search yielded me this which seems straight forward enough, PDF to XLS with Python
My client have pre-printed certificates. Now, we want a dynamic run time certificate printing options as per matches schedules into the Match arranged.
One option I have seen at .Net guys help, they have generated PDF of scanned Certificate Image with PDF Writer and created textbox like to replace Name, txtName, then Date as txtDate etc for replacing dynamic values run time.
However with PHP/CakePHP, Any idea, how can we achieve the same logic with our requirement.
You should install tcpdf, and explore more.
Create a template of pdf and all dynamic values replace with your cake values.
See image as background on tcpdf example. http://www.tcpdf.org/examples.php [51]
I'm searching for a good way to add meta data to a file. dsofile.dll works fine for NTFS. The meta data is lost, when one drops a copy on a FAT32 share (it uses NTFS hidden streams I guess). Microsoft Word documents contain meta data that are not lost, how do they do it? Similiar to FAT, sending the file via E-Mail strips of all meta data created with dsofile (and also meta data created by hand with Windows Explorer). Separate meta data files are not an option. It must be compatible with standard Windows techniques. If I send someone a file with Outlook and he sends it back, the meta-data should not be lost.
(the required meta data is actually only an ID)
The issue is that all file systems provide a single-stream view of the file as a greatest-common-denominator. Through this interface which exposes the files "contents", you can read or store properties and have them be transported with the "contents" by naive system (or user-) utilities. For example, CopyFile in Windows will carefully lose alternate data streams and has no notion of "shadow files".
The question is whether or not the format of the "contents" allows for arbitrary addition of properties.
Some formats allow arbitrary content (e.g., MSFT's docfile aka .doc/.xls/etc). Some allow limited content (.mp3, .jpg, .exe).
Some are completely SOL (.txt, .bmp).
Any solution would be format-dependent. MS OFfice files are (all) compound files and there's a place for properties there. In some formats (PE files, for example) it's safe to just append data to the end of the file, if you know how to read them later. In ZIP file you can probably find a place in the directory or just add a helper file with your data to the archive. Other formats can't stand this, and you'd need to find your own way at solving the problem.
Actually, file name can also be a good placeholder for your ID.
If you need to store the files somewhere but don't need the file to remain readable by outside applications, you can pack them to ZIP archive or use something like our SolFS
library.
What about the standard properties rather than custom DSOFile properties? Ie Comments, Author etc? do they get wiped?
Not sure if its ideal but a way we've gotten around it is that we have a tool that will take the DSOfile properties and save a text file, which is then emailed along with the file, and at the other end the user runs a tool to re-import the dsofile properties from the text.