On occasion, users wish to combine multiple email outputs and multiple PDF outputs into one email with a single, multi-page PDF attachment.

For example, within Dynamics 365,  a customer places a number of orders throughout the day. In order to reduce the effort involved in processing these orders, they are processed in a batch at the end of the day (this would apply if they were manually processed in groups as well).

As standard, the system would output one email with one attachment for each of these processed orders. We need to reduce this to one email with a single, multi-page attachment.

To do this we will use the PDF Merger module.

There are two places within Lasernet where we need to do some configuration in order to achieve this outcome, firstly we need to add in a PDF Merger module and configure it, then we need to configure the merging settings on the email output module.

PDF Merger

The PDF Merger is a module that can be added to Lasernet from within the Developer application. Please follow these steps:

1.  Navigate to the Modules screen and then select the PDF Merger from the Engine menu in the Object Box.

2. Click and drag this into the working area on the right with the rest of the modules and then double click on the Pass Through Destination object:

3. Click  Destinations in the top toolbar and then select Outmail from the list of destinations.

4. Double-click this and swap the destination from Outmail to the PDF Merger:

5. Double-click  the PDF Merger option in the list, and add the following criteria:

6. Click OK > OK, then navigate to the PDF Merger object, and double click to open it:

7. From within this window, click Combining in the top menu, select the Enable Job Combining checkbox and then click Link JobInfos.

8. Click Add and then add the Job Info you want to use to combine the PDF documents. For this example, we have used the MailTo job info. Click OK.

If your batch job is going to take a long time to run, make sure the combining isn’t going to time out before the batch job does.

9. From within the PDF Merger, click Destinations on the menu at the top.

10. Click Add at the bottom of the screen, add Outmail as the destination for the PDF Merger and click OK at the bottom of the screen to save your changes to the PDF merger.

We have now told Lasernet Developer that when it receives a message from Dynamics, to combine any PDFs that it gets within five seconds into one PDF document. The next stage is to ensure that the emails are also combined.

Email Merging

Configuring email merging is similar to the PDF merging we have just completed. Please follow these steps for configuration:

1. From within the Modules screen in Lasernet Developer, click the Outlook Mail object to open it.

2. Click Combining in the top menu as before, and then select the Enable Job Combining checkbox.

3. Click the Link Job Infos button and select the job infos we want to use to link the emails. In the example, we have used the MailTo Job Info again.

4. Click OK and within the Outmail Properties window, ensure the Timeout is set appropriately again.

5. Click OK to save your changes. 

The system will no combine both Emails and PDFs from the same MailTo address into one Email with a single, multi-page PDF attachment.