Mail Merge Configuration

This topic describes how to configure the mail merge functionality for creating letters from single records in Aurea CRM.Web.

When the user selects the menu action A_MailMerge, Aurea CRM.Web connects to Microsoft Word to display a document template from the Aurea CRM database. Data from the current record is merged with the document template according to the Word Processor format definition.

The mail merge is executed by a plug-in. For further details, see CRM.launcher(Enterprise).

The user can modify the letter and then upload it to the Aurea CRM database as a D1 document linked to the current record via a document link (D3).

To configure the single letter functionality:

  1. Create menu entries/buttons using the A_MailMerge menu action for the info areas you want your users to be able to create letters from (e.g. MA, PR).

    This calls the MailMerge action template. For further details, see MailMerge.

  2. Define any additional settings (e.g. for filtering the available formats) as arguments in the MailMerge action template. For further details, see MailMerge Action Parameters.

Clicking the menu item/button results in the creation of a letter. If your configuration of the MailMerge action template results in multiple Word Processor/transfer formats, a dialog is displayed where the user can select a format.

Note: The single letter feature first tries to load the format with the given name and the logged-in user as owner, and - if it does not find such a format - it loads the administrator format with that name.

When the letter is created, its default name is generated as letter_{tablecaption}_{rep}{extension} (e.g. letter_Aurea Software_Joe Smith.docx).

You can define customized file names using variables (Save document as field in the word processor format). For further details, see File Name Variables.

Characters that are not valid in file names (*,' etc.) are automatically replaced with "_".

If the document name does not already contain a valid file extension, an extension is added automatically. Valid extensions are those that are registered on the web server (via Windows registry or settings.xml). For further details, see Configuring MIME Types.

The file extension (e.g. ".pdf") is determined by the MIME type (e.g. "application/pdf") of the document. If no mime type is defined, the extension of the document template is used. If the document template has no extension, ".docx" is used as a fallback.