We are looking into moving into more marketing driven emails to our customer. Currently we utilize IFS to send the customer order confirmation, however, the email to our customer doesn’t provide the marketing experience we want today.
Does anyone know if IFS has capabilities on document creation, instead of creating PDFs as we do today, can we export the content via xml or some other structured language? This would allow a marketing automation system to take that data (such as send Order Confs / Invoices / Ship Notes) and send them in a nicely formatted HTML version, with tracking and driving the customer back to our site.
Or is there a way to improve the emails being sent out of IFS the contain a PDF?
Export Customer Order Acknowledgement to XML rather than PDF
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Hello,
Would writing a Quick Report (and exporting it as Excel) containing sales order information work? All the data is there for the querying, you just need something that can access Oracle data or an Excel sheet with all the information on it.
I assume the “marketing automation system” you mention can take in any sort of data, even something like a CSV file. PDFs are indeed worthless for such endeavors, but Quick Report output should suffice. Alternately, see if the automation system has an Oracle connector so it can grab the data directly from the underlying Oracle database.
Hope this helps,
JoeK
Userlevel 7
+31
Hi
You should be able to achieve this with Report plug-ins.
The reporting plug-ins concept allows anyone to write a plug-in that transforms report data into various formats used for printing or integration. A plug-in layout has a special type (Other) and require an RPL (Report Plugin Layout) file to be imported.
We have provided five standard plug-ins that are available out of the box.
- The CSV plug-in transforms a flat xml stream into a CSV (comma separated values) stream and forwards it to a desired destination (binary, file, e-mail).
- The EXCEL plug-in transforms a flat xml stream into a xml style sheet stream that can be opened with Excel and forwards it to a desired destination (binary, file, e-mail).
- The XML plug-in forwards the xml input stream to a desired destination (binary, file, e-mail) without any transformations.
- The XSLT plug-in transforms a xml stream according to XSL code from the .rpl file and forwards it to a desired destination (binary, file, e-mail).
- The SCRIPT plug-in transforms a flat xml stream into a collection of scripts (e.g. ZPL Scripts, EPL Scripts) and forwards it to a desired destination (binary, file, e-mail).
XML or CSV plug-in should work for your case.
Read the documentation below.
Overview of Report Plug-in concept:
Development of Report Plug-ins:
Hope this helps!
As per my understanding, your requirement is e-mailing the reports in XML format.
If so, you can use the reporting rule to achieve this. Please refer to the following configuration I tested for customer order confirmation.
1) Configure a report rule as follows. (Here I have setup Mail to someone routing address for testing purposes)
2) Select the printer “Send XML to Connect” when you print the report.
If you need, you can set up this as the default printer from the Printer Definition window.
I’ll attach a sample output XML file for your reference.
Hope this helps.
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