Technical information
INSTALLATION AND ADMINISTRATION GUIDE
200
Group Files
Often, when you are sending a group fax, your recipient information is actually stored in some sort of database. Most
databases support some sort of data export to a neutral file format, typically some form of "delimited ASCII."
The VSI-FAX group mechanism allows you to pass these delimited ASCII files to the fax server. The fax server will
use recipient information in the file to send the group fax.
File Structure and Syntax
Group files have a very simple structure. Consider the following sample group file:
Delimiter= ,
Tagnames=tnm, tfn
Mr. Smith, 5551212
Mr. Jones, 5551213
The first line contains a delimiter statement. The default delimiter is the pipe (|)character. If your database exports to
pipe-delimited ASCII format, you do not need to add this line to your group file.
The second line contains a tag listing. This defines the tag order that will be used to retrieve information from the
remaining records in this file. In this example, two tags are used: to name (fnm) and fax number (tfn).
The remaining lines in the group file contain the name and fax number for each recipient of this group fax. In this
case, there are two recipients: Mr. Smith and Mr. Jones.
Delivery and Processing
Group files must be identified to the fax server using the vfx -g <srvr_grp_file> or -G
<phonebook_group_alias> options. The -g option is used when the group file is located on the fax server in the
$VSIFAX/lib/groups directory; the -G option is used when a phone book group alias is designated.
Fax merge using group and template files
Although template files are primarily used to customize various email messages sent by the fax server, they work
especially well with group files. The combination of the two is ideally suited for sending highly personalized faxes to
large groups.
You can use the group file to define various personalized pieces of information for each recipient (this information it
typically retrieved from a database and exported to some delimited ASCII text file).
You can then use a template file to merge the information from the group file into a common fax form.
When you send a group fax using a template file, the template file must be the first file attachment defined in the fax
envelope. Otherwise, it will be imaged as a plain ASCII text file.
Because template files can be ASCII text, PostScript or PCL files, all of which can be natively imaged for faxing, the
fax server must have some way of knowing when to perform the special processing needed to interpret tag
statements inside a template file. This is done by specifying tag processing with the vfx -t fcv=tags option. This
can be done using the vfx command line, in a tag or batch file or by using embedded commands.
Consider again the simple group file groups.txt from one of our previous examples:
Delimiter= ,
Tagnames=tnm, tfn
Mr. Smith, 5551212
Mr. Jones, 5551213
Consider also the example template file:
Dear ${tnm:Sir},
A fax was sent to ${tfn} concerning ${sub:your recent order}.