Send Topic to User in E-mail

[acapelad]

My support group frequently sends links to customers for specific topics related to the issue they are having.

Is there a way to have a button on each topic so they could just click on the button and a form would pop-up where they could enter the e-mail address and have the specific topic sent in an e-mail ?

[Peter Grainge]

Snippet 38 on my site contains Roger Nilsson's script that does that. The help does have to be located somewhere the customer can access it from your servers via the web.

[acapelad]

thanks so much ! works great.

2 questions though.

1. i want to have the topic title appear in the e-mail subject, e.g "Useful Information - Configuring a Router")

the topic head appears in the robohelp code as <title>actual topic name</title>

what can i put in the java code to pull that actual title from each topic and insert it in the mail subject ?

2. how do i insert a line break in the mail body so that the hyperlink appears on a separate line from the sentence ?

many thanks !

[Peter Grainge]

Roger Nilsson

You there? This is the page on my site that contains your script. Can what acapelad wants be done?

http://www.grainge.org/pages/snippets/mailto.htm

[Roger_N]

Sure -

here is a variation of that script, grabbing the title of the web page for use in the subject line, and inserting two spaces in the body:

<p><script type="text/javascript">
var mailSubject = document.title;
var mailBody = 'This page might help: %0A %0A' + location.href;
var mailDisplay = 'Click here for a demo.';
document.write(
'<a href="mailto:yourname@yourSite.com'
+ '?subject=' + escape(mailSubject)
+ '&body=' + mailBody
+ '">' + mailDisplay + '</a>'
);
</script></p>

I should mention that this breaks if there is no title tag in the web page. It shouldn't be an issue for RH generation, but can be if building your web pages manually, or with an editor, and forget the <title> tag.

[HWHomberg]

Awesome, that's some good code to know. Thanks for sharing, Roger!

[MergeThis]

That script will place the cursor at the start of the "This page..." text.

Our usability people discovered that users were unsure what to do (click the End button and Enter button twice). So we added two line breaks after the "[Enter comments here]" text, which is a gentle reminder to select taht text and start typing. We also use a "letter" image for the link. Here are the two lines we use:

=================
var mailBody = '[Enter comments here] \n\nMy comments apply to this page: ' + location.href;
var mailDisplay = '<img title= "Send us your comments." src="../../letter.gif" border=0>';
=================

The result is:

=================
[Enter comments here]

My comments apply to this page: file:://mypath/mytopic.htm
=================


Good luck,
Leon

[Roger_N]

Leon -

My version of Outlook doesn't recognize the newline character (\n) to create a line break in a mailto: address. That's why I used the hex value for a CRLF.

What email client/version are you using ?

[MergeThis]

Roger:

Outlook 2003; also works on Outlook 2000.

[Peter Grainge]

Cool! I'll amend the topic for anyone needing this in the future, with the usual attribution to you.

[acapelad]

almost there ... one more question ....

The mail subject now includes the specific topic title, but I want to proceed it with standard text, such as "Information You Requested: <topic title>.

How do I hard code text in front of the variable ?

var mailSubject = document.title;


Many thanks for all your help.

[HWHomberg]

Interesting about the /n, didn't work in Outlook 2000 for me. The %0A does the trick, though.

acapelad, give this a shot:

var mailSubject = 'Information You Requested: ' + document.title;

[Roger_N]

.... the /n newline character doesn't work in my Outlook 2000, or Outlook 2003 (w/ SP2). It's a mystery to me... I wonder if the Service Pack update has anything to do with it...