Any interest in sending emails as Outlook appt. request???

Question

All,
I recently had a business need to send emails as meeting requests in Outlook. There are two ways to do this:
1. The appt is sent as an attachment that a user can open and accept.
2. The appt is sent as the email.
The latter was the business requirement. This is done be combining a vcalendar standard with some things that Outlook needs to see the email as an appointment.
It was a pain in the butt but I've made progress and got it working. It will NOT work with APEX_MAIL.
I'm posting this because I know this is not just ApEx specific but if some people are interested, and the forum administrators don't mind, I'll post some details to get the ball rolling for others.
Please respond to this if you are interested.
Regards,
Dan

Answer 1

All,
Of the two methods I mentioned before I will explain the second: sending the appointment as the email. The trick here, and the reason APEX_MAIL will not work, is that the email is a MIME multipart message that consists of two parts: the icalendar object and the regular message data. APEX_MAIL, at least for now ;), is not robust enough to allow us to create and specify the custom MIME types needed. For the basics on multipart messages see the following...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIME#Multipart_Messages
For those of you that have the ability to use Java, the javax.mail package will work BUT REQUIRES MODIFICATION. See the following for details...
http://forum.java.sun.com/thread.jspa?threadID=169827&start=0&tstart=0
If you would prefer to keep your solution in PL/SQL or do not have the ability to use Java, I've included a specification and body for a basic procedure, SEND_MAIL, that can be added to any package. This is only a basic procedure to help get you started and requires EXECUTE ON UTL_SMTP.
All you have to do is call the SEND_MAIL procedure passing a valid icalendar object to the p_body_cal parameter. For details on that see the following…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICalendar
I HIGHLY recommend creating a function to create your icalendar objects for you. Let me know if you would like an example of such a function.
SEND_MAIL spec
   PROCEDURE send_mail (
      p_from         IN  VARCHAR2
    , p_to           IN  VARCHAR2
    , p_subj         IN  VARCHAR2
    , p_body_html    IN  VARCHAR2
    , p_body_cal     IN  VARCHAR2
   );SEND_MAIL body
   PROCEDURE send_mail (
      p_from         IN  VARCHAR2
    , p_to           IN  VARCHAR2
    , p_subj         IN  VARCHAR2
    , p_body_html    IN  VARCHAR2
    , p_body_cal     IN  VARCHAR2
   AS
      l_connection   UTL_SMTP.CONNECTION;
      l_mail_server  VARCHAR2(255) := 'mail.yourserver.com';
      l_mail_port    PLS_INTEGER := 25;
      l_msg_hrd      VARCHAR2(32767);
      l_msg_body     VARCHAR2(32767);
      l_lf           VARCHAR2(2) := CHR(13)||CHR(10);
   BEGIN
      l_msg_body := ''
         || 'Date: ' || TO_CHAR(SYSDATE,'DAY, DD-MON-RR HH24:MI') || l_lf
         || 'From: <' || p_from || '> ' || l_lf
         || 'Subject: ' || p_subj || l_lf
         || 'To: ' || p_to || l_lf
         || 'MIME-Version: 1.0' || l_lf
         || 'Content-type: multipart/mixed; boundary="frontier"' || l_lf
         || '--frontier' || l_lf
         || 'Content-Type: text/calendar' || l_lf
         || 'charset="utf-8"' || l_lf
         || 'method=REQUEST' || l_lf
         || 'component=vevent' || l_lf
         || l_lf
         || p_body_cal || l_lf
         || '--frontier' || l_lf
         || 'Content-Type: text/html' || l_lf
         || 'charset="utf-8"' || l_lf
         || l_lf
         || p_body_html || l_lf
         || '--frontier--';
      l_connection := utl_smtp.open_connection(l_mail_server, l_mail_port);
      utl_smtp.helo(l_connection, l_mail_server);
      utl_smtp.mail(l_connection, p_from);
      utl_smtp.rcpt(l_connection, p_to);
      utl_smtp.data(l_connection, l_msg_body);
      utl_smtp.quit(l_connection);
   END send_mail;Good luck and happy coding.
Regards,
Dan
I forgot to define l_lf...
Message was edited by:
dmcghan