RE: mail merge interop ?

[Hanssens Bart <Bart.Hanssens@fedict.be>]

Thanks Doug,


now that's really interesting as a starting point for discussion.

Actually ODF 1.1 does have some (basic) support for address structures not related to
mail merge: text:sender-* (or 6.3.6 "subsequent authors" in the ODF 1.2 cd1)

Semantically it is limited to "senders" or "authors", so perhaps in ODF-Next it should be
reworked into a more general address structure, and find a way to use it for mail
merges ?


About interoperability, I suppose most of the time you can get away with using
database fields in a fixed order. And as long as the database part is interoperable,
you might have a working solution for most cases.

Trouble begins, of course, when you have to deal with countries that use different
address formats (like "streetname number" vs "number, streetname").
Then you might have to resort to breaking up an address into "address lines" instead
of nicely structured entities...


Best regards,

Bart


PS: action point: check how mailmerge is done in your favorite ODF-applications ;-)


________________________________________
From: Doug Mahugh [Doug.Mahugh@microsoft.com]
Sent: Friday, May 29, 2009 3:43 PM
To: Hanssens Bart; oic@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: RE: mail merge interop ?

Hi Bart,

The mail-merge problem I was thinking of has to do with the concept of address blocks, as described in IS29500, Part 1, Section 17.16.5.1 (ADDRESSBLOCK).  Physical mailing addresses are a very common scenario for mail-merge, and the ADDRESSBLOCK structure allows for a document to be merged with a list of addresses from various countries, with each address formatted as specified by POST*CODE (Universal Postal Union 2006) for each country.

As far as I know, there is not a way to define that type of mail-merge in an ODF document.  If that's correct, then it's not clear to me what we could test in terms of ODF interoperability for mail-merge.  It would be odd to leave out one of the most common uses -- if not THE most common use -- of mail-merge (physical addresses) and only test other scenarios.

If there's an aspect of this that I'm not understanding correctly, I'd be interested in learning more.  For example: does anyone do multi-country mail-merge for physical mailing addresses, using an ODF document as the template?  If so, how does that work?

Regards,
Doug


-----Original Message-----
From: Hanssens Bart [mailto:Bart.Hanssens@fedict.be]
Sent: Friday, May 29, 2009 2:47 AM
To: oic@lists.oasis-open.org; Doug Mahugh
Subject: mail merge interop ?

Hi,


Going through a back log of various blogs and comments, I noticed that Doug mentioned that there are some
issues with mail merge interop.

Doug (or anyone else for that matter), could you shed some light on these issues ?
Is it due to filling out fields in the mail template, or java-centric connection strings, query issues... ?
Thanks.

Best regards,

Bart