Alert Mechanism Vs Email Adapter? please help!

Question

Hi Experts,
       I have requirement where I have to send error info as email. The email has following characteristics:
1. Content is multi-line.
2. Data is dynamic.
3. Content has to be formated. Like header, footer and '---' lines as separaters.
4. Content could be more than 100 lines.
5. More than one email content may be consolidated into one.
6. Content can also be sent in HTML format.
Is email alert mechanism suitable for this requirement? if yes then How?
If all of the above can be satisfied by Alert mechanism then what is the use of Email adapter?
Are there any pros and Cons of using Alert mechanism and Email adapter?
Please help!
Thanks
Gopal

Answer 1

Hi Gopal,
Please be specific in your question. Do you want to send an error info as an e-mail when your scenario causes an error or Do you want to send an error log which is generated for any other scenario as an e-mail attachment/Error log’s Content as the body of  a mail. Both these things are possible in SAP XI 3.0.
1.       We can send an e-mail with multi-line content using E-Mail Adapter.
2.       We can set Dynamic Data as the e-mail content.
3.       The Dynamic Content has to be formatted either in Mapping or in Module and then sent to E-mail Adapter. E-Mail Adapter cannot do the formatting.
4.       Content can be of any number of lines.
5.       The consolidation should be done in Mapping or in a Module program and the consolidated data should be given to  the adapter.
6.       Yes Content can also be set in HTML format
The above said points are possible in SAP XI 3.0’s email adapter. Alert Mechanisms can be used when you want to send an alert on any event occurrence. It has many limitations like the content should be within specified length etc. we cannot use alert mechanism to pick a file and post the content of the file as an Email. Alert mechanism will work only for the alert categories which you have defined.
Regards
kausik m