To better understand the way mail merges are executed in Mail Merge for Microsoft Access consider the following use case.
Access Mail Merge is made flexible using the process- activities model to allow for this kind of processing. The process would go like this:
Process: e-mailmerge
Record 1 in process
Activities
Activity
(MailMerge doc rec 1)
Activity
(SaveAs doc rec1)
Activity
(MailMerge html rec 1)
Activity
(SaveAs html rec 1)
Activity
(E-mail to list with body= html rec 1 and attachment = doc rec 1)
Record 2 in process
Activities
…
For this
a. the SaveAs the process needs to be informed that it gets the
(document)object passed which is created by the MailMerge,
b. the email will need to know which files are to be used for each record
being processed.
Note that SaveAs could have been implemented as an additional set of properties
of the Mail Merge activity. However we prefer an uniform and balanced
process-activity approach.