Automated Birthday Notifications a week in advance

[customfamily]

Hey all,

So finally I'm able to contribute something to this forum, not just ask for help. I'm sure I'm not inventing the wheel here but after finding no straight forward solutions to my problem in previous forum entries I toyed around with this and found a very simple way to have FileMaker send out an email notification a week before an upcoming birthday.

I have a birthday field with a dropdown calander and a simple script that says:

If: Contacts::birthday = Get ( CurrentDate ) + Day ( 7 )

Send email

This works fine, so far so good. My one concern is that if the 7th days falls on a weekend, when FileMaker is not opened by anybody in the office, I'm guessing no notification will be sent. How can this be avoided? I could set a second notification for 4 days prior to the date but that's not a real solution. How can I make the Day (7) part of the calculation "dynamic"?

Any and all suggestions would be highly appreciated.

Best,

R.

[customfamily]

I set this script up to run when the file is opened...which is also a problem because that way multiple emails are sent out within a day. So...far from a perfect solution but a start. What am I missing?

Edited November 23, 2009 by Guest

[Zcast]

This isn't going to be to helpful as I do not know how to sript it just yet, but I know you can check to if the current day is "Friday", check to see if you have any emails that should be sent out on sat, or sun, and just have them sent out on Friday instead. Would that work for you?

[customfamily]

I guess that would be a solution. I certainly can't think of anything better.

Would there be a way to avoid sending duplicate emails with your solution? If it can check the date, could the script be set to only run once every day of the year?

Thanks so much for the suggestion, I'll start looking to it.

[carlstarus]

Hi,

you could add a field that gets populated when the email is sent. And have your script say, that if this field is empty to send the email anytime within those 7 days. Once the email is sent, if anyone else opens the database and it goes through the script, it will find the field populated and abort sending.

Hope this helps.

Edited December 17, 2009 by Guest