Mail Merge Feature for a CRM web-app made in asp.NET - asp.net

Question

We're working on a web based CRM for my company in ASP.net. I frequently have to send newsletters to all of my customers, and it becomes tedious to manually copy all of their addresses. What I would like is a feature to send one mail to all of my customers, taking their addresses from our contacts database, similar to a mail merge.
My developer said that he can do this for Emails, but not for physical mail. His reasoning behind this is that he can write a script that sends the mails to all customers one by one, but he can only give one single print command, which would only be able to print the current contents of the page. Therefore, he would not be able to print the individual letters for all of the customers.
Does anyone have ideas on how this would be possible? E.g. printing the page in such a way that each letter would be printed on a seperate page, or another way to automatically print all of the letters (with the mailmerged fields)?
Any help will be appreciated. If you require more details, please tell me.

Answer 1

A webpage is not the right solution to physically print letters. What you need to produce is a report that would generate a PDF file. This report will generate a PDF document with a different customer address on each page. Try using Microsoft Reporting Services, it is included in SQL Server. Crystal Reports is also a popular reporting solution too.
Also, you will have a hard time printing the stylized contents of your nice looking e-mail in the reporting solutions mentioned above. Consider using the report only as the cover letter of your mail piece.

Answer 2

One possible solution is to use 3rd party library for creation of individual letters for your customers. Docentric Toolkit is .NET tool that solves exactly your problem. We are using it for creating individual letters for customers and they all are merged in one file so that printing is done only once. Users can even create or change template documents.
Next you would have to create a template document in MS Word where you would include fixed content and placeholders for variable content which would be filled in at runtime with customer information.
After processing the data in .NET application you merge the data with the template document (see code snippet below). Your final document will be one file with letters for your customers, each on its own page. This file can then be sent to the printer with one print command.
I am attaching a code snippet of a Main method of the sample console application. The project has references to Entity Framework and Docentric’s dlls and uses entity model of Northwind database.
As you can see, it is really easy to prepare the data and merge it with template document. Solution is suitable for ASP.NET and MVC applications because you don’t need Microsoft Office installed on the server.
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Diagnostics;
using Docentric.Word;
namespace DisplayCustomers
{
class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
// first we read customers - in the example we select only customers
// from USA and Canada and order them by country and customer name
List<Customers> customerList = new List<Customers>();
using (var db = new NORTHWNDEntities())
{
customerList = db.Customers
.OrderBy(o => o.Country)
.ThenBy(o => o.CompanyName)
.Where(w => w.Country == "USA" || w.Country == "Canada")
.ToList();
}
// next we merge customers data with the template and generate final document;
string templateDoc = #"C:\Test\Templates\CustomerLetter1_templ.docx";
string outputDoc = #"C:\Test\FinishedLetters\CustomerLetters1.docx";
DocumentGenerator dg = new DocumentGenerator(customerList);
DocumentGenerationResult result = dg.GenerateDocument(templateDoc, outputDoc);
}
}
}