An external merge field enables you to store customer-specific data on a web server and then insert that data as text into an e-mail message. For example, you might create an external merge field that gets information about a customer's order from your web site.
The merge field itself references a URL, as in the following example:
<merge URL=http://www.abc.com/getorder.asp/>
NOTE: In this example, you must first set up a backend process on your web server, using ASP or CGI, to populate the external merge field with the needed data.
You can also insert specific information from a URL, as in the following example:
<merge URL="http://www.abc.com/getorder.asp?customerid=<merge name="External Customer ID"/>"/>
In this example, KANA Response goes to the specified URL and looks up the customer's information using their External Customer ID number. Note that one command is nested in another.
NOTE: The data must be text. It cannot be HTML.
You must encode the following special characters using XML, unless these character occur at the first level of nesting:
|
& |
& |
|
< |
< |
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> |
> |
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" |
" |
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' |
' |
If you want a customer to view an entire web page, do not use an external merge field. Instead, type the URL into the text of the message.
If you run the KANA Response Server on Solaris, you must do one of the following:
Maintain parallel DNS entries to match WINS entries
Use numeric IP addresses when you enter URLs for external merge fields
This is because the KANA Response Server on Solaris cannot resolve host names from a WINS server. Therefore, if a host name resides on the WINS server, but not on the DNS server, external merge fields that use the host name will have the following text inserted instead of the targeted data:
<EXTERNAL MERGE FIELD FAILED: Cannot find host name [host_name]>