Add support for multiple To, CC, and BCC addresses when emailing
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Development Project Status: Completed
At present, all mails sent via the mail dialog can only be addressed to a single address.
When emailing customers, users may select from a list containing the customer's email addresses, and those of any referring vets for the current patient.
When emailing suppliers, users may select from a list containing the supplier's email addresses.
This project will allow support for:
- multiple To addresses to be entered
- multiple CC addresses to be entered
- multiple BCC addresses to be entered
- staff email addresses
JIRA: OVPMS-1555
1. Address Entry
- The To, CC & BCC fields will allow multiple email addresses to be typed in, separated by semi colons.
- Email addresses can have the form "xxx@yyy" or "name <xxx@yyy>" e.g.
Joe Bloggs<jbloggs[at]gmail[dot]com>;Fred Smith<fsmith[at]hotmail[dot]com>;maryp[at]outlook[dot]com- incomplete addresses can be automatically completed by pressing Enter
- if multiple addresses match an incomplete address, an Address Book will be displayed allowing selection of the correct address.
- the address book will also be displayed when pressing Enter:
- in an empty address field
- after a semicolon where no address has been entered
2. Staff Email Addresses
To enable emails to be CC'ed or BCC'ed to staff members, an email contact will be added to the security.user archetype.
When emailing, this will displayed as the concatenation of the Full Name field, and the email address. e.g. Joe Bloggs<jbloggs[at]gmail[dot]com>
Setting the Name field of the email contact can be used to override this behaviour. By default this is "Email Address". If changed, this will be used as the display name for the staff member, overriding the Full Name. This is to support practices that use a short name (eg JB) in the Full Name field to allow for faster selection of clinician names.
3. Address Book
The Address Book is a popup window that presents the user with a list of contacts to select from. Only one address may be selected at a time.
Contacts will be displayed in a paged table, with three columns:
- name - the contact name, if changed from the default, or the associated customer/supplier etc name
- email address
- type - one of Customer, Referring Veterinarian, Referring Veterinary Practice, Supplier..., or User
The contacts will be initially be sorted on name.
When emailing customers, the Address Book will contain:
- the customer's email addresses
- addresses of any referring vets for the current patient
- staff (i.e. User) email addresses
When emailing suppliers, the Address Book will contain:
- the supplier's email addresses
- staff (i.e. User) email addresses
4. Migration
This change will require database migration in order to support contacts for users.
Comments
Re: Add support for multiple To, CC, and BCC addresses when ...
Tim A - this is one of our 'required enhancements'. If possible, can you please cost it (including the 'add this BCC to all emails' - and can you also do this for SMS's as well - this would address our Email & SMS logging requirement).
Regards, Tim G
Re: Add support for multiple To, CC, and BCC addresses when ...
Tim A - this post serves to clarify our off-forum discussions and present them here.
1. to enable emails to the CC'ed or BCC'ed to staff members, an email address field will be added to the security.user archetype. This field can contain either a plain email address (eg jbloggs[at]gmail[dot]com) or a name and email address (eg Joe Bloggs<jbloggs[at]gmail[dot]com>). The second is to support the different uses made of the Full Name and Description fields in the user record - some practices use a short name (eg JB) in the Full Name field to allow for faster selection of clinician names.
2. the To, CC & BCC fields will allow email addresses to be simply typed in separated by semi colons and the email addresses can have the form "xxx@yyy" or "name<xxx@yyy>", eg
Joe Bloggs<jbloggs[at]gmail[dot]com>;Fred Smith<fsmith[at]hotmail[dot]com>;maryp[at]outlook[dot]com
3. a 'look up' facility will be provided. This can either be a pull-down as at present, or a search/select facility as is provided in the current Message facility. The selected item will be appended to the current address set. Multi-select will not be possible (ie if you want to add two addresses you do it one at a time)
4. the list of available addresses will be drawn from:
a) in the customer workspace - the customer's email addresses
b) in the patient workspace - the customer's and any referrer's email addresses
c) in the supplier workspace - the supplier's email addresses
PLUS all the users who have email addresses
5. in order to assist in the selection, each entry will be as follows:
name<emailAddr> - source
where 'source' will be one of 'Customer', 'Referring Veterinarian', 'Supplier(Person)', 'Supplier(Person)', or 'User' [these being drawn mostly from the archetype names]
and for an email contact, 'name' will be taken from the name field of the contact.email archetype UNLESS this is set to its default value (normally 'Email Address'), and in this case the standard customer etc name (ie for a customer, the company name if there is one, else lastName,firstName)
For a User, 'name<emailAddress>' will be set directly from the email address in the user record.
6. in order to support email and sms logging, the party.organisationLocation archetype will have a 'BCC email to' and a 'BCC SMS to' field added. These will be automatically added to the BCC list as the email (or SMS email) is transmitted. There are separate addresses for email and sms to allow independent tracing of each.
Tim A - I hope that this clarifies everything.
Regards, Tim G
Re: Add support for multiple To, CC, and BCC addresses when ...
I've updated the spec, but left out the logging stuff for the moment - it may be worth spinning out into a separate project.
If supported, it needs to be done for general emails, reminders, statements and SMS.
Re: Add support for multiple To, CC, and BCC addresses when ...
Whether the 'system inserted BCC' is in a different project or not - I would still want the facility - though I agree that one might want separate control over what has the BCC inserted.
Regards, Tim G