Who is getting this?

You might have noticed that if you add lots of subscribers to an alert, none of them know about any of the others.  It can be a good thing if you are quietly keeping an eye on someone making sure they act on their report, but sometimes you know other folks are getting it, but knowing who all might also be acting on it can be tricky.

So, a good practice for any multi-recipient emails is to just add a list to the bottom of the email.
It is super easy to do with just a pinch of old time HTML.  You may remember your unordered list tags <UL></UL> and list items <LI></LI>and your nice small text tag <H6></H6>  Just combine them as below:

<H6><UL>
<LI>Recipient 1</LI>
<LI>Recipient 2</LI>
etc.
</UL></H6>

Now when you do it, take out all of the extra line returns before saving it, otherwise it makes the list longer than it needs to be, but for legibility here I used them.  If your staff has trouble with small font, bump them up to an H5 instead.

Conditional coded HTML

Lets face it, if a lazy person can avoid clicking a button to find out how much work they have to do, they will.  This is especially important when deciding how Vineyardsoft KnowledgeSync should send data.

One of our reports tells the folks in the warehouse when we show a negative inventory on hand.  Most likely it is because someone did an inventory adjustment while not realizing that the product was just misplaced, or at someone's desk for demonstrative purposes.  It happens, deal with it, move on.  That said, no one wants to have to go looking to see what happened, and do another inventory adjustment.  It's much easier to pass the buck or pretend you didn't see the email.

Which brings us to our trusty event manager.  So, I could do an absolutely beautiful report in Crystal with lots of color and information.  But then it would get sent as an attachment.  Does anyone really think that the warehouse crew will happily open that attachment every day?  Most likely not.  So, I have the information in the body of the email instead, so that it pops right up for them.  Some of them even have their work email sent to their phone, so I know they can see it without having to download a PDF viewer.

Did you forget all of your high school / early college HTML classes?  I hope not, because that is what Event Manager uses to pretty up your email notifications.

Now my boss doesn't readily understand the differences between HTML and Crystal, so something that is easy to do in Crystal, isn't necessarily so easy to do in HTML.  One of which is changing the formatting based on the data.

In order to do this, I created a calculated field in my Query Definition.  I then wrote it do return a <B> tag in the desired condition.

In the body of the email, I put the tag in the place where a <B> may or may not go and write in a </B> tag to close it regardless of whether it is there or not.  Voila, conditional formatting!

This example was something easy, just making something bold.  But the same principle could be used to other things also.   Just remember you might need to do the computation twice to make an open tag and a closed tag, depending on what type of formatting you are trying to do.