CopiaFacts Features > FFMERGE > FFMERGE Action Line

There are up to three items you may place on the FFMERGE action line for a fax-merge or broadcast operation:

•	The fax number and/or e-mail address to which the document is to be sent.

•	A list of document numbers which are to be attached on each transmission.

•	A control key or data item which FFMERGE can place in the CopiaFacts FS control file for each transmission to help you monitor the progress of the broadcast.

The fax number and/or e-mail address should appear first on the action line, followed if required by the attachment list, followed if required by a data variable definition. The fax number may contain special characters such as parentheses and hyphens which will be automatically stripped. You can specify using the FFMRGNT setup program what characters are to be stripped in this way. An e-mail address is identified by the presence of an '@' character. If both fax number and e-mail address are present, they should be separated by a semi-colon, and the second item will only be used if the transmission to the first one fails. Only a single FS file is generated when both items are present.

The exact syntax of the FFMERGE action line will depend on what application you are using. If your word processor distinguishes fieldname items in a document template by using angle brackets, for example, the top part of your template might appear as:

When this template has been processed by your mail-merge package, an individual document might then appear as:

If you wish to attach documents from your CopiaFacts document base to each transmission, you can create a template such as the following:

The example above will attach documents 8800 and 8821 after the expanded template document for each recipient. The numbers of the documents, if more than one, must be separated with commas and with no spaces, and there must be no spaces on either side of the "=" sign. The code at= may be either in uppercase or lowercase letters. FFMERGE will look for the documents in the directory or directories specified in your CopiaFacts user profile.

If you have a large broadcast you may wish to have a simple way to identify which documents have been transmitted. A simple way to do this is to place a "variable" name and value preceded by vr= on the FFMERGE action line. Typically this could be the key field or lastname field from your mail-merge data file. Using this feature will allow you to identify quickly any fax transmissions which fail to go through (and for which the FS file will have been moved to the CopiaFacts FAIL directory). The value should be enclosed in double quotes.

If you wish to alter the priority of individual items, you can also set a queue number by entering for example ts=7 on the action line. Normally the priority is set for the whole merge in the FFMRGNT setup program.

The following is an example of how you could use these features in your template document to set a CopiaFacts variable called "name":

After processing by your merge program, an individual document might appear as follows:

FFMERGE might create the following lines in the FS file for this transmission:

$fax_filename @FFBASE\TEMP\00001671.TIF

$fax_phone "6307788848"

$var_def NAME "HERSEE"

Note that the variable values from your data file are converted to upper case.

Topic url: http://www.copia.com/support/refmanual/index.html?ffmergeactionline.htm