WAPReetings - A WAP Greeting card example

-Mohammed Mudassir (mmudassir@cyber.net.pk)

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Sending e-Cards via Email in IT Centric era is common ... we send them to our love ones, to our bosses, to any person whom we wish, whether they are our next-door neighbours or live abroad.

In this article we are going to explain how to create a WAP Enable Greeting Card System: WAPReetings.  So we can send a greeting to those who are have a WAP Enable Device.

Overview on sending a WAPReeting

The following diagram defines the sending architecture of WAPReetings.

Figure 1 diagrams the process of sending the WAPReetings. 

As user types the URL of our site, for example http://www.myserver.com/, this opens the Cards.asp page where we present the list of Cards, which are available on our site. When the user selects the card, and enters the email address of the person to send the card to and some greeting text, after the entry and basic validation we will send the greeting in a WML format.

Before explaining Receiver Scenario, I have to explain the Email Body structure:

<Date>
Dear <Receiver_Name>,
You receive a WAPReetings from <Sender_Name>.
Please type the following
<URL>
Regards,
WAPReetings

Now in the above Body Structure which we will going to generate after the User Input, contains some dynamic words which I encapsulated in Angular Brackets which are briefly describe as follow:

<Receiver_Name> = The person who is receiving the WaPreeting.
<Sender_Name> = Name of a person who is sending the WAPReetings
<URL> = A Dynamic URL which Receiver have to pick which might look like this http://www.myserver.com/getCard.asp?rid=19121978
<Date> = Date when Email is generated

Lets summarize this stage step by step:

First we will browse the cards

After browsing we select and see the details of the card, like how it looks like, what is the description of that card etc.

When we are satisfied with the card, we will generate the card, like give our own customize Greeting Text, Email address of the receiver and name and also sender name & email.

After submitting that data we will be directed to the sendCard.asp where the information which we submitted into the generateCard.asp will be retrieved and then send a WAPReeting via CDONTS. The email contains a url of our card in following is the example URL:

http://www.myserver.com/getCard.asp?rid=19121978

Overview on receiving a WAPReeting

Receiver scenario is very simple:

Browse to the page readMails.asp where we can only see our WAPReetings.

As we read the mail, we will get the URL containing the Receiver ID and we just have to browse the link and it will fetch our WAPReetings.

In the next section I am going to explain how to implement this code.