RE: mail merge interop ?

[Doug Mahugh <Doug.Mahugh@microsoft.com>]

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