Context Types and how to use them in AutoMail

Introduction

On every AutoMail template there is a property which determines the context type used by the letter.

 

The context type determines:

For example, Individual (Personal Tax) context type would be used for personal clients with tax information displayed in the templates. The context type of a template determines which tags from the IRIS database should be available for selection in the Tag selection screen.

 

Context Types available

To view a list of Context Types available, please see the How to guide titled What context types are available in AutoMail?

 

How to create a Template and set the Context Type

To create a new template and assign a context type to the template, you will need to:

  1. From IRIS Main Menu, click IRIS AutoMail.

  2. The IRIS AutoMail - Letter Request browser screen displays. From the toolbar, click Templates.

  3. The AutoMail - Letter Template Maintenance screen displays. Select the folder that you would like to save your template to for example User Folder.

  4. Click New Template.

  5. The New Template screen displays. Enter a description for the template that you would like to generate.

  6. Select the Context Type from the drop-down list for your target clients. For example, if you would like to send a letter out to your business clients only then you would select the Business context type.

  7. Click OK.

 

Changing the Context Type on an existing Template

You may wish to change the context type on an existing template if you want the letter to either be sent to a different client type or you want to select some different tags on the template.

For example, you have already setup a template with context type Client. However you want the letter to include personal tax tags, therefore you will need to change the context type to Individual (Personal Tax).

There are 3 stages to changing the context type of a template:

Change template property

  1. From IRIS Main Menu, log on to IRIS AutoMail.

  2. The IRIS AutoMail - Letter Request browser screen displays. From the toolbar, click Templates.

  3. The AutoMail - Letter Template Maintenance screen displays. Locate and highlight the folder that the template has been saved in, highlight the template.

  4. Click Properties.

  5. The Edit Template Properties screen displays. Select the desired Context Type from the drop-down list.

 

Remove the Tags from the template, that is, the Tag Selection screen

  1. A Warning message displays "You have changed the context type. Please remove any now invalid tags from the Word document", click OK.

  2. Where the template contains tags that are no longer correct for the Context Type selected then a question screen displays with a message "the tag "XXX"" is no longer correct for this context type. The choices available are:

  1. Once you have clicked through all the prompts the MS Word template will be displayed.

 

Remove the Tags from the Word Template.

  1. When the Word template is displayed, you will have to manually remove the tags from the document.

  2. For example, you have a tag "XXX" that is no longer correct for the template, although it has been removed from the tag selection screen, it has not been removed from the template. Thus you would need to locate the tag XXX and delete it.

  3. Once the MS Word document has been edited, and the invalid tags removed, click Save in the tag selection screen.

  4. If all tags have not been removed from the document, you may get an "Invalid Merge Field" message. For more information about Invalid Merge Fields see KB article 6700

 

Context Type Error Message

When you generate a template, you may get a message:

Client type mismatch with template context type

This message means that the template that you have selected for the client is incorrect. For example you have selected an Individual context type template for a Business client.

To resolve this you would need to either:

  1. Change the Client that you are producing the letter for. For example instead of the personal client you would need to use the business client (Sole Trader).

  2. Change the context type of the letter to ensure the correct Context type is being used for the client. For example, change the context type to the 'Business' context type. Please see above on How to change the context type of an existing template.

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