Hi Sean,
Not to wind you up with yet another 'helpful' suggestion... but here's what I
would do, if I've understood you correctly.
I think you're formatting a nice message in a field using LC styling; then
using the Mime Encoder feature to format it to include in an email. But when
you try to put a table in the field, it doesn't come out nicely.
My suggestion would to be do that, but where you want the table in the field,
just put "***TABLE***" or similar.
Then do the minimal work to generate the table in HTML format, and insert in
the result of the mime encoder, so you end up doing something like
put mimeEncodeFieldAsMIMEMultipartDocument(pField) into tMessageBody
replace "***TABLE***" with tHTMLtable in tMessageBody
Let the MIME encoder do all the dirty work it does on the messy stuff. Do the
straightforward rendering of a table in HTML yourself. Combine the two.
My 2c. Apologies if this a lecture on sucking eggs.
Ben
On 09/09/2021 09:35, Pi Digital via use-livecode wrote:
Hehe. Full of ‘solutions’ :)
It’s because we need to see it as a table in an email :D
That’s the point of the question.
Here’s my full process if it helps you understand.
I (that is to say, a server I code and manage) process around 100-120 emails a
day from the mobile (cell phone) carriers O2 and EE. They all get done at about
5am every day at including weekends. Some have call data in them and some do
not. Some have broken csv’s in them. Myself and others in the team need to
quickly know when it breaks so we can look into it.
So, to be absolutely sure, we email ourselves every morning a list of which
emails have been processed for all of the clients (4 so far). It has the
details of the email UID, the customer name, the client(or Dealer as we call
them) name, the date range, the account number, number of Kb, and a bunch of
other relevant data to us. This list has grown. Each line has a of course a
different length and does not format out like the table it is put into in LC.
The purpose of the email is a forceful reminder to us to check. The subject
let’s us know immediately if there may be issues by telling us how many got
processed and how many had data and how many are potentially broken. These can
only be indicators. We find ourselves in the rubbish position of checking it
over by eye.
We ‘could’ have it sent to a database, or show up in an app or all manner of
other methods but by far and away the simplest way for us to daily get this
reminder is by a simple email with a heading and a list. Email is a system with
a long track record of ‘working’. The fact that email still exists is testament
to this. A quick scan over this daily doc helps us quickly see which ones we’ve
already checked, what potential issues there are and, more importantly for me,
if the remote server had completely fallen over. No need to open any links or
other software to view quickly a stream of data. It’s easier to recall and
delete than our mySQL database. Email is just there, always.
So, the ability to quickly convert our little table from a text field on the
server into the body of an email is what I’m looking to do. I had expected the
mime field encoder to do this but it seems it’s only very simple in its view of
a field.
The data returned from ‘the htmlText of field’ is so long and convoluted and
also does not contain either the correct formatting or table info suitable for
email.
So, it looks like if I have to do it I will have to code a whole html method
for expressing it as a table in an email body that email will accept and
display as expected. That’s why I had ‘hoped’ that the MIME encoder already did
it for us. Alas, negatory!
I didn’t want to have to have put all this into an email when asking the
question and ‘hoped’ that a simple question would suffice to get a simple
answer (which MarkW was gracious to provide from the most qualified position I
know).
But, seriously, thank you for your interest and attempts to offer useful
suggestions. Sometimes what sounds like a simple answer actually just
overcomplicates the ‘end user experience’. Something we as software engineers
should be ever aware of ;)
Thanks again
Sean
Pi Digital
On 9 Sep 2021, at 05:29, Rick Harrison via use-livecode
<use-livecode@lists.runrev.com> wrote:
Hi Sean,
Why don’t you just email them a spreadsheet or a .csv file,
let them open it. and they can copy and paste whatever they want
into their own spreadsheet?
Rick
On Sep 8, 2021, at 10:43 PM, Pi Digital via use-livecode
<use-livecode@lists.runrev.com> wrote:
Hi Rick
Because, as stated before, you can’t select the text and paste it into a
spreadsheet.
Thanks though.
Sean
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