Setting Up Letter Templates

You can set up a customer contact type to generate a form letter whenever a customer contact of this type is added. In fact, this is the only way to generate a letter in the system.

Fastpath: Refer to Printing Letters for more information about how letters are produced.

Every customer contact that causes a letter to be sent must reference a unique letter template. To define a letter template, open Admin Menu, Letter Template.

Note: Doc 1 users. If you use the Doc 1 software to produce letters, there will be a template in the Doc 1 software associated with each letter. The name of the Doc 1 template must be the same as the code associated with the letter template set up in the system.

Description of Page

The following fields are required for each letter template:

  • Letter Template is the unique identifier of the letter template.
  • Use Description to enter a brief description of the letter.
  • Turn on Special Extract if this type of letter should only be created via a system generated event such as a collection letter. Turning on this switch is what prevents a user from adding a customer contact that references this type of letter template (because you don't want a user to be able to request a letter associated with a system generate event by adding a customer contact, rather, they must execute the appropriate process and it will generate the customer contact).
  • The next two fields control how letters of this type are printed (both in batch and online). Refer to Technical Implementation Of Batch Letter Production for more information about producing letters in batch. Refer to Technical Implementation Of Online Letter Production for more information about online letter production.
  • Use Batch Control to define the process that creates the flat file that is passed to your letter printing software. If you use an Extract Algorithm to construct the downloaded information, you can use the LTRPRT process.

  • Use Extract Algorithm to define the plug-in component that constructs the "flat file records" that contain the information to be merged onto letters of this type. This algorithm is called when a user requests an online image of a letter on Customer Contact - Main and it may also be called by the batch letter extraction process defined above. Click here to see the algorithm types available for this plug-in spot.

Where Used

Follow this link to open the data dictionary where you can view the tables that reference CI_​LETTER_​TMPL.