[thelist] html emails using outlook files to be archived

Luther, Ron ron.luther at hp.com
Thu Oct 7 09:23:54 CDT 2004


Andrew asked about:

>>i want to create a template which will be used to send out an invoice, I'd
>>like the template to be accessible by others in the office and with blank
>>input fields.  I would also like to have the file saved to a specif folder
>>on the network - invoices perhaps.

>>Does what I ahve explained sound striaghtforward enough to setup?


Hi Andrew,

Yes, I think that could be set up. Any server side language should be 
able to read the file names in that directory and create a new file 
with an 'incremented' file name. (e.g. The sixth invoice created by 
salesperson number four in October could be "I410040006", where "I" 
is for invoice, "4" is the salesperson, "1004" is MMYY and "0006" is 
a counter.)

However, unless this is an extremely small operation that intends to 
_stay_ extremely small ... I would recommend against this. I don't 
think it would scale well and I'm pretty confident it will bite you 
in the butt later when:

(a) A user comes back to you and says "Oh, I need to update the address 
on one of these. Can you help me?"

(b) Management comes in and says "Quick! (It's always 'Quick!' isn't it?) 
I need a copy of every invoice issued against so-and-so for the last six 
months!" ... That would be kind of a pain to respond to with an individual 
file based architecture like you are describing.


You really need a database oriented solution for this kind of thing. That 
would enable all kinds of reporting and updating that will be a royal 
pain to try to implement in the kind of system you're looking at. If your 
application (or data history) reaches any kind of size ... it should also 
be much faster.


HTH,

RonL.


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