Ladies & Gentlemen
Before I embark on what could be a long and circuitous expedition to
nowhere, I wonder if you MHonArc experts could cast your eye over the
following idea to see if it could work: (apologies for the length of my
explanation, I have tried to be as concise as possible)
SITUATION:
We are developing a variety of Cold Fusion applications which all
require input from "non html experts" to be inserted in web pages.
There are a number of ways of achieving this, but they are all more or
less complicated, mainly to do with the control of the format and
positioning of images.
I had this idea that modern web clients (eg NS 4 and Outlook express)
have a nice simple wysiwyg email editor with the capability to embed
inline images, so what the user does is simply create his bit of
editorial and send it by mail to a specific address and then CF grabs
the mail, processes it and inserts the editorial in the page / indexes
it / puts it in a database or whatever, and puts the images somewhere
usable, in a usable form (ie unencodes them).
I particularly like the possibility of doing it by mail because it can
work at almost any level, from anywhere at any time (rather than in an
"on-line web page editor", for example the ActiveX one at
http://www.ektron.com)
Our servers run: NT 4 sp 4 / MS iis 4 / Cold fusion 4 pro. /
post.office 3.5.1 / Activestate Perl 32
Oh -....and I know nothing about perl, (but I know a man who does...)
THE PROBLEM:
CF has no way (and there are no add-ons available) to properly parse
MIME mails, and as I have discovered even the two clients above seem to
produce MIME mails in completely different ways (for example NS 4.5
seems to put a unalterable path in for attachments as
C:\windows\dos\ns_invented_filename.xxx , Outlook Express puts the raw
base64 image data in a text file, Etc Etc)
SOLUTION?
1 - Send mail to dedicated address
2 - run it through MHonArc - which processes it and basically builds
(overwrites) a single html page
3 - Once the mail is established as an ordinary html page then there are
any number of CF methods of grabbing and processing it to suit the
objective.
In the first instance, is this a far-fetched idea? It may be that this
is quite a common technique, but I haven't found it.....
Secondly, how to action MHonArc.
post.office has the feature "delivery of a message to a program", and
also I know perl programs can be run from CF, but I really don't
understand how one runs perl programs (specifically MHonArc). Is it by
a command line type syntax, url parameters or what? Any enlightenment
would be welcome!
--
Regards;
Richard Meredith-Hardy
-------------------------------------------------------------
rmh(_at_)flymicro(_dot_)win-uk(_dot_)net
Tel: + 44 (0)1462 834776 FAX: + 44 (0)1462 732668
