Configuring the Database Accounts
In order to create/modify/delete the database accounts, follow the steps given below:
Stop the JCourier by pressing the "Stop" button on the tool bar. Press the
"Database Account" icon on the tool bar to view a list of existing database
accounts or
choose "Action | Database account" from the menu bar.
When you do either of the above said action, the "Database Accounts"
dialog box will be opened as shown below.
Figure 1.1
In the above figure, the list box at the centre of the window, will show you
all the configured database accounts. Press the "New" button to create a new
Database Account. To remove an existing Database Account, select one from the
list and press the "Remove" button. To view/edit the properties of an exsting
account, select the account you want to view/edit and press the "Properties"
button. Press the "Close" button to close the window.
Creating a New Database Account
Press the "New" button in the above dialog box to create a new Database account.
A new Dialog box will be opened as shown below.
Figure 1.2
Name:
Specify a friendly name for this account. If you are planning to use this
account for sending news letters, you may give the name as "NewsLetter". As
in the case of POP-3 Accounts, in this case also JCourier will create new
file(s) for each new Database account. So make sure that your operating system
allows to create a file with the name you have specified here.
From Address:
In this field, specify the E-Mail address, that JCourier has to use while sending
the News Letters. In this case, it could be "newsletter@yourcompany.com". It is not
necessary that this E-Mail address should be existing.
When you are done with the above, click on the "Database Info." tab on the
top of the window and you will see the following screen.
Figure 1.3
Database Driver:
Here you specify the Database driver that JCourier has to use in order to connect
to your Database. If you are using windows and have ODBC installed, then the default
driver "sun.jdbc.odbc.JdbcOdbcDriver" (JDBC-ODBC bridge) will work with all the
popular RDBMS. But, if you are using a diffrent OS, you may have to have a JDBC
driver which allows JCourier to connect to your database. If you do not know much
about this, contact yout Database administrator.
Data Source Name:
Here you will specify the Data Source Name along with its protocol and subprotocol,
that actually points to your database. If you are using windows and have installed
ODBC drivers, then the data source name will be "jdbc: odbc:yourdatasource". Here
"jdbc" is the protocol and "odbc" is the sub protocol. If you are unable to fill
this field, please contact your system/database administrator.
User Name:
Specify the user name that is required to connect to the database. JCourier will
try to login to your database with this user name.
Password:
Specify the password corresponding to the user name you have specified. Both
user name and password will be used to login into your Database server and gain
access to the data.
When you are done with the above, click on the "Tables/Columns" tab on the
top of the window. By doing so, you will see the following screen.
Fig - 1.4
Click on the "Show" button to view all the tables that are there in the
database you have specified in the previous step. When you do so, JCourier
will try to connect to the database and will show you all the tables in that
database. If JCourier can not connect to the database, it will display
an appropriate error message. Selecting a table from the "Select a Table"
drop-down list box will populate the "Select a Column" drop-down list box
with the column names in the selected table.
Consider the following example which will show you how to select the table
name and column name.
Suppose, you have a Table called "subscribers" in your database.
The "subscribers" table has four columns namely "NAME", "EMAIL", "TITLE" and
"TEL". You store details of the persons those who have subscribed for your
weekly news letter. Inorder to automate your news letter mailing using JCourier,
select the table name "subscribers" in the first drop-down list box and, the
column name "EMAIL" in the second. The basic idea is the column name you select
must contain an E-Mail address in it. This is same as firing a query to your
database "SELECT EMAIL FROM subscribers", which will yield a result set that
will contain all the E-Mail addresses of the subscribers.
Alternately, you can write your own query by checking the check box
"I want to write my own query". This is required when you want to get the
E-Mail addresses conditionally, or you have to query on multiple tables.
One E.g. could be, if you want to send a product upgrade/patch to your
clients who have 1.0 version, then your query could be "SELECT EMAIL FROM
CLIENTS WHERE PROD_VERSION='1.0'".
Note:
Make sure that your query yields a result set with only one column and
that column contains E-Mail addresses. Even if your query yield a result
set with more than one column, JCourier will pick the first column from
the result set and treat the data in that column as an E-Mail address.
When you are done with the above, click on the "Message Details" tab on
the top of the window. By doing so, the following screen will appear.
Fig - 1.5
Here, you will enter the actual E-Mail related data viz. subject for
the E-Mail and the file name that contains the message. Again, the
file can be a HTML/TEXT file.
Thats it. Press "OK" to save the settings. The above window will disappear
and you will see the following screen.
Fig - 1.6
If any error occurs while creating the new account an appropriate
error message will be displayed. Now the new account "NewsLetter"
is created. When ever you want to send Newsletters to your subscribers
that are there in the database, select the account from the list and
press the "Send Mails" button. When you do this, JCourier will fetch
the data from the database by executing the query corresponding to
this account and saves them in the .obx (OUTBOX) file. This process
may take some time depending on the number of records in the table.
After doing so, click on "Close" button to close the dialog box and start
JCourier. As you can see from the status window, JCourier will start
sending mails to all the E-Mail addresses that are there in the database.
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