VPE output of PDF through to Lotus Notes e-mal

[stephpwork]

Hi
We use VPE in conjunction with Progress databases.
There are two sites
One uses Microsoft Outlook and Exchange as its e-mail
The other uses Lotus Notes as its e-mail

At the Microsoft site the application programs generate output to VPE. Users then have an option to e-mail output and a PDF is produced the e-mail client is fired up correctly and the attachment can be e-mailed without fault. The resulting attachment file might for example be named
Quotation Confirmation.pdf

However, for the Lotus notes sites we get a problem
The PDF file appears to be produced with a randome file name similar to VPE7d8244200ee3. There is no .PDF extension to the file name. The file is attached to the e-mail and mail can be sent - Testing shows that the file content is actually in PDF format.

Sometimes, but not always the VPE print preview task, or the underlying calling application (prowin32), will crash.

The VPE client installations are running version VPECTRL35

Any advice on a solution to this problem will be appreciated.

[IDEAL Software Support]

The crash might rather be a Progress problem, please see http://idealsoftware.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=521

The problem of the attachment having a name like VPE7d8244200ee3 instead of your document name, e.g. "My Document.pdf" is an implementation bug of Lotus for Simple MAPI.

Simple MAPI has the option to attach a file with any file name. In this case VPE creates a temporary file (therefore this cryptic name) and attaches it. Simple MAPI has also the option to use an alias for the attached file. VPE is using this alias. It is obvious that the Simple MAPI layer of Lotus does not handle the alias name correctly.

Solution: contact Lotus tech support and tell them to fix this bug.

Workaround:
Call Vpe.ClearMailAttachments(), write the current VPE document to PDF with Vpe.WriteDoc("my doc.pdf") and attach the generated file with Vpe.AddMailAttachment(). This way VPE does not attach itself the document file as PDF and as a result no temporary file with a cryptic name is attached.

Regards
Thorsten Radde
IDEAL Software GmbH