Working with ADempiere contacts from Thunderbird

In this recipe, we will further extend our basic add-on, which we developed in the previous recipe, so that we can pull out the contact detail from the ADempiere database and use the e-mail IDs in composing mail in Thunderbird. The following diagram depicts the setup, which is used in this recipe:

The add-on allows the user to select a business partner type (vendor/customer/employee/prospect/sales rep). Based on the selected type, it makes a call to the ADContacts.php to get the user contacts of the selected type from ADempiere. ADContacts.php reads the matching users detail (name and e-mail) and returns the list back to the add-on. Add-on then parses the list, gets all the e-mail IDs out from it and launches the compose mail window with the e-mails IDs already added in the To list. The add-on can be used to quickly send a mail to a category of users in ADempiere.

Getting ready

Verify that you have got the basic add-on ready after following...