Is there a simple way to merge a letter with their upcoming appointment information. I want to be able to email to write confirmation letters with their upcoming dates on it. Thanks for your help! Robert

Nobody has every tried merging an appointment (a meeting from your calendar) into a letter?????

I was hopeful that "nextPendingTimeblock" would merge the next appointment for a selected contact into a letter template, but so far, no luck.

I'm sure it would work in a Print layout, but that would end up adding steps to the process of sending via email, which would not be ideal. I'm going to keep "playing" a bit to see if I can find the correct code. In the meantime, perhaps someone from MC will chime in and either let us know what the code needs to be, or tell us it can't currently be done.

I spoke too soon - it does work, sort of (I was using my own contact to test, and that doesn't work, but using someone else does).

So far, here's what I've got - using this in the letter template:

 <$contact.nextPendingTimeblock$> 

results in the appropriate information, but not properly formatted and filtered, as the one I'm testing comes out like this:

 <NSKVONotifying_GWTimeblock: 0xa31c070>
		 startdate: 2006-08-03 12:00:00 -0700
		 enddate: 2006-08-03 15:00:00 -0700	
	 subject:Lunch Kelly & Crew		 
typeCode:1 

So, there needs to be some additional code for that key to parse the data to produce the desired output. I don't yet know what that is, but I thought I'd let you know that it does appear to be possible.

Scott

I'm back

Here's what you need to put in your letter template to get the next pending timeblock for the selected contact:

<$contact.nextPendingTimeblock.name$>
<$contact.nextPendingTimeblock.startDate.shortDateTime$>
<$contact.nextPendingTimeblock.endDate.shortDateTime$> 
<$contact.nextPendingTimeblock.details$> 

Which in my test, output this:

quote:

Lunch Kelly & Crew
3/8/06 12:00 PM
3/8/06 3:00 PM
Sister in town, lunch in SF.

Hope that helps.

Scott

Hi Scott

nextPendingTimeblock is a key that gives you access to the next appointment, like any key that gives you access to an appointment. So, you can go "further down" into the appointment to get more detail, which can be formatted, etc. as you desire.

For instance, nextPendingTimeblock.activityName will give you just the name of the appointment; nextPendingTimeblock.activityDate will give you the date and time that the appointment starts; nextPendingTimeblock.location will give you the location, etc.

Most of the keys that you can access are available in the Daylite Data Description document which is part of the developer kit posted in the Community/Third Party Add-ons part of our website.

HTH

Looks like you got to it while I was writing my reply. Well done. Anyway, there are tons of fields and lots of ways of formatting them (it's up to how creative you are in your letter template and which information you want to show), so play around.

Cheers,

Thank you so much for looking into this for me.

Im a "x" Window/ACT! user and have just welcomed myself to an new iMac and would like to throw out my PC!

To Scott (or anyone else) You did a wonderful test for me, thank you. When you placed

<$contact.nextPendingTimeblock.name$>
<$contact.nextPendingTimeblock.startDate.shortDateTime$>
<$contact.nextPendingTimeblock.endDate.shortDateTime$>
<$contact.nextPendingTimeblock.details$>

this into the letter template, I cant just paste it in? This is what I am having trouble with?

Thank you in advance for the help.

Also is there anyone that knows how to transfer ACT 2006 database with 4000 contacts into Daylite without losing information?

Robert

Hi Robert,

Yes, you can copy and paste that into a letter template. Make sure you're doing so in the actual template (Daylite->Preferences->Letter Templates) and not directly into a merged letter.

Also, this particular code will get the information based on the contacts selected, and will only get the next timeblock scheduled for those contacts after the moment you do the merge.

As Adam pointed out, there are numerous other pieces of information you can include, using slightly different code. You can also place each individual line of that code above anywhere in the template either together or separately (i.e., each piece is self-sufficient, not requiring other code to do its thing).

All the different merge codes that are possible are available in the data description document in the developer kit available here. If you look under the sections for "Contact" and for "Timeblock" data you'll see the various "methods," which are the pieces of code used. Then you can alter the code I posted above based on combinations of those (for me, as someone who is not a techie by training, it takes a lot of trial and error). For example, you'll see that "nextPendingTimeblock" is listed as a piece of information that can be obtained for a Contact - and "startDate" is a piece of information available to Timeblocks, and so forth.

As for the importing of data from ACT, I'm afraid I can't be much help with that. I do know that Daylite lists ACT as an option under File->Import, but I've never tried it myself.

It works! Thanks

Next question... when you make an appointment ther e is a yellow box with Appoinment, event, call... Can you change these?

And could you make a merge letter just to confirm a call?

Do you mean change the options? (e.g., add "Conference Call" as an appointment type)

I don't think that's possible - but if you have specific appointment types that you think might be widely useful, you could suggest them to MC at daylite-feedback@marketcircle.com

You could make a merge letter to confirm a call using the same code you've already got, if the call is the "next" timeblock for that contact. To do a merge letter for a call that is not the next timeblock would probably require some more complicated coding to do an "if/then" statement to search for timeblocks listed as "call"

In the letter template itself, you can easily add the appointment type with this code:

 <$contact.nextPendingTimeblock.typeString$>
 

or the appointment's category with this:

 <$contact.nextPendingTimeblock.category.name$>
 

So you can use either the timeblock type, or categories to easily get additional information into the confirmation letter.

Hope that helps.

What about if I have an appointment with an organization? If there a key for that?

Robert