RE: [oic] RE: mail merge interop ?

["Dennis E. Hamilton" <dennis.hamilton@acm.org>]

Based on this report from Bernd, I am inclined to think that a MailMerge
scenario is not a very good interoperability case.  It is more of an
application feature case and I think we should stay clear of that.

It seems to me that if there were an interoperability case, it would have to
do with the electronic receipt of the resulting documents and how the
populated fields show up.  But I think this might be rather far-fetched.

Perhaps an alternative, moderate scenario would be a turn-around document
that has fields that need to be entered and the document then returned to
the originator.   (I just ran into one of those, a US Internal Revenue
Service Form W-9 in a PDF that had fields for entering of taxpayer
information.  There was no way to fill in my signature though, so I ended up
printing the populated document, signing the paper copy, and scanning that
one in for electronic submission [;<).

The reusability of a mail-merge template document might be of interest, but
I wonder if this is high-hanging fruit considering how the merge process is
so implementation based?

 - Dennis

-----Original Message-----
From: Bernd.Eilers@Sun.COM [mailto:Bernd.Eilers@Sun.COM] 
Sent: Tuesday, June 02, 2009 05:39
To: oic@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: Re: [oic] RE: mail merge interop ?


Hi there!

 > [... snip ...]

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

OpenOffice.org uses Database Fields in an ODF document template as 
specified in Section 6.6 of Open Document Format for Office Applications 
(OpenDocument)v1.2 
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/32431/OpenDocument-v1.2-cd
02.odt 


MailMerge in OpenOffice.org is bascially done by OpenOffice.org 
iterating through the rows of a connected database source, filling out 
DataBaseFields of a template document with data. There is a fixed set of 
address fields the OpenOffie.org MailMergeWizard knows about which is 
matching those to fields of the database source, eg. an address book. 
The Default Settings are such that the database source columns are 
expected to have the same names as those address fields in the 
mail-merge-wizard but different mappings can be configured also.

Basically you can say that there is nothing specific to a mail merge 
operation defined in the ODF Specification and that a mail-merge feature 
for an ODF Application would be just a very special kind of usage of the 
database fields concept of ODF.

So Interoperability here is IMHO not an issue of the completness of the 
ODF Support / ODF Interoperatbility for an ODF-Application here but 
merly an Application compatibility Issue outside the scope of ODF 
Interoperability. For example there may be an issue of using 
compatible/non-compatible address field names in template documents used 
by MailMerge features. And than there may be an issue of which types of 
database sources the applications do support.

Kind regards,
Bernd Eilers


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