Mailmerge and WPTools
RBuilder can do mailmerge, but does not support formatting a date that's
merged in from the database, according to a not-too-old post. My brain-dead
DBMS doesn't support formatting dates either. If I let WPTools do the
merge, I can grab the date and format it as I want and hand it back to
WPTools to put in the letter. But I want RBuilder to print the letter. This
leads to the question:
Can I use RBuilder to print letters, but have WPTools do the mailmerge?
It sounds plausible at first. I put one of the WPTools add-ons for RBuilder,
TppDBWPTRichText, in a detail band, just like I would if I were letting
RBuilder do the merge. I set Mailmerge to false, since RBuilder won't be
doing the merging. I add a JIT pipeline for retrieval of the RTF text. I
have a separate DBPipeline for the report itself. Seems like this should
work: Once per record, RBuilder asks for RTF text from the JIT pipeline, and
I use WPTools to do the merge and hand back the RTF text.
But I haven't been able to figure out how to "hand back the RTF text."
Julian Ziersch is busy getting V4 of WPTools out the door, so I thought I'd
ask here, in case anyone has been down this road before. Thanks for any
help.
Mike Carroll
Sigma Data Systems, Inc.
merged in from the database, according to a not-too-old post. My brain-dead
DBMS doesn't support formatting dates either. If I let WPTools do the
merge, I can grab the date and format it as I want and hand it back to
WPTools to put in the letter. But I want RBuilder to print the letter. This
leads to the question:
Can I use RBuilder to print letters, but have WPTools do the mailmerge?
It sounds plausible at first. I put one of the WPTools add-ons for RBuilder,
TppDBWPTRichText, in a detail band, just like I would if I were letting
RBuilder do the merge. I set Mailmerge to false, since RBuilder won't be
doing the merging. I add a JIT pipeline for retrieval of the RTF text. I
have a separate DBPipeline for the report itself. Seems like this should
work: Once per record, RBuilder asks for RTF text from the JIT pipeline, and
I use WPTools to do the merge and hand back the RTF text.
But I haven't been able to figure out how to "hand back the RTF text."
Julian Ziersch is busy getting V4 of WPTools out the door, so I thought I'd
ask here, in case anyone has been down this road before. Thanks for any
help.
Mike Carroll
Sigma Data Systems, Inc.
This discussion has been closed.
Comments
Haven't done what you are trying, but you could create a calculated field
that is a string-image of the date field.
Ed Dressel