Communication Operations

We will add the following operations to our system menu (in the “Administrator” visual perspective) that will deal with member communication:

1. “Email to member” item in the “New” folder – allows creating and sending arbitrary emails to members
2. “Letter to member” item in the “New” folder – allows creating and sending arbitrary letters to members
3. “Member contact note” item in the “New” folder – creates ContactNote object
4. “Correspondence” item in the “Find” folder – searches the system for all e-mails, letters and contact notes with the specified details
5. “Review unsent letters” item in the “TODO List” folder – searches the system for all letters with “Unsent” status
6. “Print unsent letters” item in the “TODO List” folder – prints all letters with “Unsent” status
7. “Review unread e-mails” item in the “TODO List” folder – searches the system for all received e-mails with “Unsent” status

Configuration of most operations is straightforward and is similar to the configuration of other operations that we have already covered in Communication Operations. You can check this in the configuration of the sample library application located in the “samples” directory of your AwareIM installation.

The only item that we want to mention here is Correspondence that should run a query to find communication with a member. This query searches the business object group, not the individual business object as before (see "Find member" operation, for example). Conditions of such queries can only involve attributes common to all members of the group (they must have the same name and type) and the query can only display common attributes. As we wanted to check the text of the communication we made sure that all members of the group have Message attribute (we ended up renaming the Text attribute in the OutgoingLetter object to Message, for example). We also wanted to display the names of the member that the communication was with. At the moment it is not possible to include reference attributes into the list of attributes displayed by a query (although it is possible to include them in query conditions), so we added shortcuts to all members of the Communication group (CorrespondentFirstName and CorrespondentLastName) – see Presentation of reference attributes