Application That Uses Email as Input
Hello all!
I recently got a summer internship developing a small program for a manufacturing company that essentially wants to keep track of different work orders that come in throughout the day. They have a system in place already that monitors the assembly places and allows you to report errors or missing items, etc. and when this is done- an email is sent out to various department heads and they are supposed to handle whatever item needs to be handled. This process has been wasteful and is hindering production. They have asked me to build a simple app that allows a user to login, which will then take them to a place that displays whatever information is pertinent to that individual, and allows them to mark a ticket as seen and then completed.
What I really need some assistance with is having these emails that are being sent out be used as inputs (preferably a .txt file) that I can parse and create condensed tickets for and create a nice log system that will make viewing what needs to be done easy.
I had originally tried to do this project in Unity, as I am a game programmer by trade and it's what I go to school for. This is not a problem that Unity can handle very easily. I have been looking for other software to try and got referred to Qt, which is supposed to be a little easier for creating GUI applications, correct? Which is why I had started out with Unity in the first place.
I know this might seem a little vague as of right now, but if I could get some assistance with the email retrieval and parsing issue, I could elaborate from there!
Thank you for any help!
I recently got a summer internship developing a small program for a manufacturing company that essentially wants to keep track of different work orders that come in throughout the day. They have a system in place already that monitors the assembly places and allows you to report errors or missing items, etc. and when this is done- an email is sent out to various department heads and they are supposed to handle whatever item needs to be handled. This process has been wasteful and is hindering production. They have asked me to build a simple app that allows a user to login, which will then take them to a place that displays whatever information is pertinent to that individual, and allows them to mark a ticket as seen and then completed.
What I really need some assistance with is having these emails that are being sent out be used as inputs (preferably a .txt file) that I can parse and create condensed tickets for and create a nice log system that will make viewing what needs to be done easy.
I had originally tried to do this project in Unity, as I am a game programmer by trade and it's what I go to school for. This is not a problem that Unity can handle very easily. I have been looking for other software to try and got referred to Qt, which is supposed to be a little easier for creating GUI applications, correct? Which is why I had started out with Unity in the first place.
I know this might seem a little vague as of right now, but if I could get some assistance with the email retrieval and parsing issue, I could elaborate from there!
Thank you for any help!
the interface is unrelated to getting the emails.
QT is a GUI development tool but its not WYSIWYG, making it a little aggravating to learn at first. Its not hard to use, just weird until you get used to stuff not looking like the product.
As for reading the emails, hopefully they are sent as plain text?
if that is the case, and this is a unix system, you can actually open the unix command line mail processing and dump to a text file from there, pick that up with some simple c++ and parse it into your GUI view. This is a crude way to do it, but its an easy way to do it if you don't have a lot of time.
You can also find an email tool, do a real connection to the mail server and peel off the emails with the correct subject(s) etc. This will take a bit more effort, but is the 'right' way to do this.
/shrug, I am more efficient than clean on internal use tools... if only 10 people that sit next to me are ever going to use it, I will do whatever gets it done the fastest, might even just do a commandline quick code that dumps it to a text file and then invokes the text file in the default reader as a pop-up. EG in windows you can just do a command line name.txt and it will pop up in the default text file reading program. Good enough for co-workers to see some text. So I wouldn't even HAVE a gui, I would steal the GUI from notepad and call it good lol. If you are ok with displaying it in another tool, you could do the whole thing with a batch or shell script without any c++ at all.
QT is a GUI development tool but its not WYSIWYG, making it a little aggravating to learn at first. Its not hard to use, just weird until you get used to stuff not looking like the product.
As for reading the emails, hopefully they are sent as plain text?
if that is the case, and this is a unix system, you can actually open the unix command line mail processing and dump to a text file from there, pick that up with some simple c++ and parse it into your GUI view. This is a crude way to do it, but its an easy way to do it if you don't have a lot of time.
You can also find an email tool, do a real connection to the mail server and peel off the emails with the correct subject(s) etc. This will take a bit more effort, but is the 'right' way to do this.
/shrug, I am more efficient than clean on internal use tools... if only 10 people that sit next to me are ever going to use it, I will do whatever gets it done the fastest, might even just do a commandline quick code that dumps it to a text file and then invokes the text file in the default reader as a pop-up. EG in windows you can just do a command line name.txt and it will pop up in the default text file reading program. Good enough for co-workers to see some text. So I wouldn't even HAVE a gui, I would steal the GUI from notepad and call it good lol. If you are ok with displaying it in another tool, you could do the whole thing with a batch or shell script without any c++ at all.
Last edited on
Topic archived. No new replies allowed.