Prepared by:

 

 

 

Garry Lowther

Technical Recruitment Industry Systems Ltd

 

Original Draft: March 2000

 

Current Version: Friday, 30 April 2010

 

Table of Contents

 

1.       Introduction..................................................................................................................................... 3

2.       Form Designing the Interview Action............................................................................................ 4

3.       Running the Interview Action........................................................................................................ 9

4.       Summary........................................................................................................................................ 12

5.       Appendix A – TriSys 4.0 Release Notes Extracts relating to E-Mail Fields............................. 13

 

 

 

 

1.      Introduction

 

Actions were designed in April 1998 without any support for electronic mail as this was not a pervasive technology in the recruitment industry at that time. Very soon afterwards, TriSys customers and prospects, were demanding that support for e-mail be included in actions. Thus e-mail support was added in November 1998.

 

Because e-mail was ‘added-on’ to Actions, the e-mail fully supports the attachment to a word mail-merged document which was the main document production technique on the original actions system. However, where customers do not wish to generate merged documents, there are scenarios where the e-mail framework does not satisfy the demands of certain business processes.

 

One such business process is that of sending interview confirmation e-mails to both client and candidate.

 

Although there are ways to work around this limitation, it is not intuitive, requires script code, and may not achieve the final objective.

 

Thus build 5.00.061 of TriSys released on 28^th March 2001 has addressed this issue by adding support for explicit assignment of e-mail recipients.

 

This document details the exact steps required to implement an interview action using the latest version of TriSys and also shows the techniques used to get fields into e-mail message text originally implemented in 4.03.

 

The intended audience is for TriSys business analysts or technical support staff with sound knowledge of the TriSys actions mechanism.

 

2.      Form Designing the Interview Action

 

This section demonstrates how to create an interview action.

 

Open form designer and find/add/update an existing action – 1^st Interview:

 

 

 

 

Note how there are a number of functions for this action:

 

 

The first function creates the actual scheduled interview as a scheduled activity and the second function generates an interview letter. The final function is the interview follow-up. These are not discussed further in this document.

 

The third function is how all interview confirmations have been created so far i.e. generate a formal word-merge and attach this to the e-mail to the candidate &/or client. Again, this is not discussed further.

 

The fourth and fifth functions are new and as you can see, generate only an e-mail, not a merged document. These are discussed in detail below:

 

 

Note how the action function explicitly tags that this e-mail will be sent to the candidate, not the client.

The full e-mail text is:

 

 

The text contains placeholders for fixed fields (<<Company.Name>>) and on-form fields which may be invisible (<<Interview1st.CompanyAddressId>>).

 

The note/history tab is as follows:

 

 

Note how the Note/History text is blank. This is so that the generated note contains the e-mail text and saves having to duplicate it.

This same approach is used for the scheduled activity:

 

 

If we now look at the client confirmation e-mail:

 

 

Note how the action function explicitly tags that this e-mail will be sent to the client, not the candidate.

The full e-mail text is:

 

 

The note/history and schedule activity texts are also blank as they inherit from the e-mail text.

Now if we look at the form design, we can see

• that the form contains both candidate and client
• the form has an invisible field CompanyAddressId which is on the form purely to get the value of it into the e-mail text.

 

 

Each of the optional functions is available too and these will show up as check boxes at run-time.

 

It is worth re-iterating that ANY field which is dropped onto the action form as either visible or invisible will be available as a << >> variable in the e-mail text, note/history text, or scheduled activity text.

 

This is how we provide the same capability as we get with Word mail merge, but without the overheads of using Word.

 

3.      Running the Interview Action

 

This section demonstrates how to run the interview action created in the previous section and the interfaces with the e-mail client.

 

To run the action, open a requirement, search and shortlist as shown:

 

 

This invokes the action as follows:

 

 

It is entirely optional which check boxes are ticked which fires the associated action function.

Checking the candidate confirmation

 

 

fires the following e-mail:

 

 

Ad the corresponding client confirmation:

 

 

fires the following e-mail:

 

 

4.      Summary

 

TriSys 5 now provides a mechanism for explicitly invoking e-mail actions which can be addressed to clients & candidates or both.

 

Analysts should now be able to implement interview actions which do not rely upon Word mail merging.

 

This document demonstrates how to do this and offers other reminders of how to use e-mail fields.

 

See the appendix for the original release notes relating to this subject.

 

5.      Appendix A – TriSys 4.0 Release Notes Extracts relating to E-Mail Fields

 

The following extracts are from the original TriSys 4 release notes and document the support for e-mail fields in actions.

 

=====================================================================

 

8.    Action fields on action form now available from within e-mail text and note/history text. For example if you had a contact config field called TestConfig, then the e-mail text can access this field value AFTER the action form     has been saved using the variable:

            <<ContactConfigFields.TestConfig>>

      It is thus now possible to include any fields from the action form in an e-mail merge.

      To facilitate more advanced usage, a trigger can be written on the ActionFieldValues table to capture the update and create/manipulate any other fields which need to be made available to the e-mail merge.

 

 

=====================================================================

 

3.    Additional Merge fields available in Action Function Note/History, Scheduled Activity/Follow-up and e-mail Subject/Text descriptions.

      These reflect the context from where the action is run from.

      If no data can be found for the field, it is removed.

      Fields must appear exactly as shown below and are

      self explanatory:

            <<Requirement.Reference>>

            <<Requirement.JobTitle>>

            <<Placement.Reference>>

            <<Placement.JobTitle>>

            <<Company.Name>>

            <<Company.MainTelNo>>

            <<ClientContact.Name>>

            <<ClientContact.Forename>>

            <<ClientContact.Surname>>

            <<ClientContact.WorkTelNo>>

            <<ClientContact.MobileTelNo>>

            <<Candidate.Name>>

            <<Candidate.Forename>>

            <<Candidate.Surname>>

            <<Candidate.HomeTelNo>>

            <<Candidate.WorkTelNo>>

            <<Candidate.MobileTelNo>>

            <<User.Name>>

            <<User.LoginName>>

      This comprises the complete list of fields and succeeds

      4.02.028 and 4.02.014.