Got a lovely project at the moment but could do with some ideas thrown at me on how to implement something.
Currently have a Windows VB.Net app that extracts data from a SQL server and is run as a service at a scheduled time.
No problems there, it retrieves the data and extracts it as a CSV file with the date/time stamped as the filename. All running sweet.
But the client now wants to have the system fully automated whereby all the letters are built pre-mailshotted(?)
Their manual workload to this is to get the CSV file and look for an ID field and seperate the rows into worksheets.
They then get a Word Document that matches the ID they are dealing with and mail merge the results.
So for example if they want only rows that have an ID of 4, then they'll open up the Word Document called "4.Doc", fill the mailmerge with all rows where ID=4, run the mailmerge into a x-amount page document and repeat for the other ID's.
But they now want this automated.
Now there's some conformity in terms of the filenames matching the ID's, so no probs there, but don't know if there's a way in VB.Net to open a Word Document and run some kind of Macro WITHIN Word to populate the data, run the mail merge and then save it!
Or can anyone else think of an alternative.
Currently have a Windows VB.Net app that extracts data from a SQL server and is run as a service at a scheduled time.
No problems there, it retrieves the data and extracts it as a CSV file with the date/time stamped as the filename. All running sweet.
But the client now wants to have the system fully automated whereby all the letters are built pre-mailshotted(?)
Their manual workload to this is to get the CSV file and look for an ID field and seperate the rows into worksheets.
They then get a Word Document that matches the ID they are dealing with and mail merge the results.
So for example if they want only rows that have an ID of 4, then they'll open up the Word Document called "4.Doc", fill the mailmerge with all rows where ID=4, run the mailmerge into a x-amount page document and repeat for the other ID's.
But they now want this automated.
Now there's some conformity in terms of the filenames matching the ID's, so no probs there, but don't know if there's a way in VB.Net to open a Word Document and run some kind of Macro WITHIN Word to populate the data, run the mail merge and then save it!
Or can anyone else think of an alternative.
try