Auto Association

In the past, it has been a labor-intensive process to determine which fax numbers (CSIDs) and Email addresses belong to which accounts and make the necessary changes to the FaxAction database. This task is, however, critical to the FaxAction workflow. In order to reduce the amount of manual labor required to make these associations, new functionality, called auto-association, has been introduced.

The first time an ad is sent to the host system from within a document received from an unknown CSID or email address, FaxAction will automatically create a new contact record for the account using the appropriate information from the received document. If the CSID is a valid fax number or an email address, FaxAction will also set the appropriate flags to ensure the contact receives automated notifications the next time a fax or email is received from this contact. The "reply to name" for the new contact is extracted from the account record for the ad using the new field Reply To Field.

This mechanism not only creates the initial contact record as described above, it also maintains the relationship between an account and any CSIDs or Email addresses that the account sends documents from. Each time an ad is sent to the host system, FaxAction will create another contact record for the account if the CSID or Email address is not associated with the account and not in use by another account. Additional contacts are created to ensure that any user-created contacts are not affected and to allow them to be easily modified or removed.

For information on preventing specific, invalid CSIDs from being automatically associated, please see the Special IDs topic.

FaxAction automatically stores the contact ID in the database for all contact records that are created through auto-association. This information can be accessed through reports run against the database or by the user in the Document Info window of the FaxAction client (accessed with a document open by selecting the Info item on the View menu).

Auto-association can be enabled separately for faxes and emails through two new fields on the General Info form in Admin. Setting Auto-Associate: New Fax Numbers? will enable auto-association for faxes and setting New Email Addresses? will enable it for documents received by Email.

The new field Reply To Field is used to describe which fields in the Accounts table are used to generate the Reply To data for a new contact record created by the auto-association mechanism. If either of the Auto-Associate flags is set, Reply To Field is required to contain a valid field name or names. If more than one field name is specified, the field names must be separated by a plus ("+") sign. For example, if the first and last name in the account record are to be used, the Reply To Field would contain C_FIRST_NAME + C_LAST_NAME. Note that the field names within the Accounts table may be different for each site.