Forte e-mail integration

Mike Nelson wrote:

> Has anyone successfully integrated an external e-mail system with a

> Forte application?

Yes.

> If you have, was your solution generic or geared to a specific mail

> system?

Two interfaces to specific mail systems. We structured it so that

"clients" of these interfaces didn't know what system they were using.

> If specific, which mail system(s) and operating system(s)?

>

> Was the integration between a Forte client and an e-mail client, between

> a mail server and Forte server, or other?

>

> How were the mail API's accessed? C wrappering? ActiveX/OLE? Sockets?

> Operating system command?

We integrated (if you can call it that) with sendmail, and also with Lotus

Notes.

For the sendmail "interface", we had a class that created a unix command

line to call sendmail and email the message. I think we even included the

message text on the command line. A service object based on this class was

then partitioned out to a Unix box. It was extremely primitive, but got

the job done. These messages were just being sent to other groups within

the company, and were probably processed automatically, so they didn't need

to look nice.

Our Lotus Notes interface is much more sophisticated. We use Notes to fax

or email letters to customers. Letter "templates" are stored in a Notes

database, and can be "customized" (i.e., the customer's name and address

are included in the letter).

We are using both OLE and the Notes C++ API. OLE is only used to "Preview"

the letter the user wants to send (we call out to Notes using OLE, and tell

it to open the "template" in the database). It works.

We use the C++ API to retrieve the list of letters which can be sent, and

also to send the letters via email or fax (fax is easy, you just send the

letter to a fax gateway). We do not call directly to the Notes C++ API

from inside Forte. Instead, we call out to a "wrapper", written in C++,

which then makes the appropriate API calls. We "extern C"'ed the functions

in tyhe wrapper so that they could be called from inside Forte.

Gotchas:

Calling out to this wrapper works well on NT, so long as you don't try to

call out from the client partition. We had call out from a service object

in it's own partition. I never figured out why it wouldn't work from

inside the client partition, but didn't spend a lot of time on it, since we

were planning to run on the server anyway for salability reasons.

However, it didn't work at all on HP UX. It turns out that you can't call

out from Forte to any C++ code that uses exception handling on HP UX. The

Notes C++ API uses exception handling, so we were SOL.

We're probably going to end up running this part of the app on an NT

server, but might also rewrite the API stuff to use the C API instead

(although we're are entirely sure that this will work on UNIX either). In

general, Notes is a pain to use on UNIX. We've had all sorts of problems

installing it and getting it to work correctly there. NT is much nicer in

this respect.

If you want to call out to the Notes API (or any other API, for that

matter) from inside Forte, do a proof of concept on all platforms you need

to use (our POC proved it could work on NT, but not HP UX). NT will be

easy, but expect some headaches on UNIX.

Dan Becker

Per-Se Technologies

dbecker@bsginc.com

at 2007-6-29 9:20:10 >