Hello, I’m an ASP beginner. I work for a very small company and the person who usually takes on the computing role is on leave and I’m the need person in line :o!

My boss needs me create some form of mail merge to our asp web site, so all people with admin rights to the site can print labels off. This would involve calling the names from SQL Server, having an option to select all or choose names from a list and then printing them out.

I’m a little over my head as I don’t have much knowledge, I hope somebody can help.

It is not clear what you are asking.

First: is this being done in Classic ASP or ASP.NET (you have posted in the ASP.NET forums).
Second: ASP and ASP.NET have no built in ability to access mailboxes. Sending email from ASP and .NET applications is simple enough but checking email is not a trivial task.

You have said that the users need to print labels off, how is this related to Merging mail?

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Sorry I'll explain, i should have named it better (My boss called it mail merge and i got confused). Yes it is asp.net.

The web site is connected to SQL Server which has client contact details. As this is at a remote server, staff members would like to print contact details onto printed labels from the website. I would also like to have an option to select all contacts or to select them one by one.


P/S Sorry should i place this in a different forum.
Thank you for your quick reply

This is the correct forum.

This is actually pretty simple since all you want to do is produce a contact list that only a subset of employees can see.

How familiar are you with ASP.NET? How involved does the app need to be? What do you know in so far as this project is related? Are you looking for someone to guide you all the way through the project? Are "Admins" defined through an Active Directory or is there a table in your database that defines people as Admins?



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Thank you for your quick reply.

I have some small knowledge of asp.net, as i helped to design the companies website. and have some knowledge in getting tables to return data from sql server but this was a number of few years ago.

The printed labels (section) of the website will only be accessible to admins, so yes there is a section that defines people as admins.
At the moment all we have is a website and an sql database.

It would be very helpful to have someone guide me through the process, or any form of help would most appreciated.

I thinking the process should involve:
1. Call just contact names i.e into a table
2. Select required contacts using check box or select all
3. Submit button will print these selected contacts onto label paper

Thank you very much for quick response

But HOW do you define someone to an Admin role? The way you go about authenticating some one in the Admin role in Active Directory is much different from doing a look up in a SQL Server table that defines a person as an admin.

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There is a table in the database that defines people as Admins

Ok I will break this down for you. First you need to provide your users a way to login to your application, these controls will help you accomplish that: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms178329.aspx These controls support the addition of roles, however, it seems an unecessary step since only admins should ever access this site. So what I would do is alter my SQL query to only validate people in the admin role, something like:

SELECT
p.pk,
p.Name
From users p
INNER JOIN roles r ON r.person_fk = p.pk
WHERE p.username = @userName and p.password = @password AND r.RoleID = 'Admin'

(This is only an example meant for illustration, but you should get the idea of what I am doing)

That should handle your Login.

Now as far as the Contact List is concerned, I am not sure the best way to do this since you have not said how many Contacts there are.

In the past when I have done this my clients have always had very specific requirements for filtering their Contacts lists, for example they would never randomly select 2 or 3 people that they wanted to mail things to it was always that they were mailing something to a specific group of people, for example, people that paticipated in XYZ event.

So let me know if your system has the same type of flexibility or if it is completely possible for someone to select 2 or 3 people at random to create labels for.

Lastly, about directly printing things to labels, this could be trial and error. I have only ever sent data to a label printer a handful of times and it was through a windows app where I had a very fine control of how the printdoc was sent to the printer. This should be the least of your worries at this point.

hth.


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Thank you for the great breakdown, it is helping me alot. I understand what you say by having only admins access the site.

There is about 80 contacts at the moment. Each contact can sign up to recieve different event information so i guess it can be filtered for which event information that they sign up to. (There is a choice of 6 events)

Ok.

I might use a dropdownlist that contains these values:
All
Event 1
Event 2
Event 3
Event 4
Event 5
Event 6

On Page_Load bind All of the contacts to the gridview so all 80 would be showing. (You may or may not want to do this.)

Handle the OnSelectedIndexChanged event of your DDL and then rebind your gridview based upon the value in the DDL how you do this will largely depend on if the values in your database are key values or simply text values.

At that point you have the information that you need, you will just need to play around with it to make sure that the information is printed correctly.

Let me know if you have any further questions.

hth.

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