How a WebService saved my day !!!

"This is a story on how a WebService saved my day ....."

This story is related to my Final Year Engineering Project - "Common Help Desk". We are developing our project using Oracle APEX - an Application Development Environment that is installed upon Oracle Server and can be used to develop full functional applications rapidly.

We as a group of 3 - Me, Sameer Suman & Shrikant Ravekar worked very hard to work (first of all LEARN) on the totally new Development Environment. Most of the work in the project is done by Sameer "Sam" & Shrikant "Shreak". I work very very very often ...... to the end I am working really "hard" on it !!!

Now after the brief introduction 2 the TEAM, i would start with the story.

The basic motive of our Project is to provide an online Help Desk that would provide an organization a facility of an automated help desk. This would reduce the paper work and delay caused due to high load. The users just need to register their COMPLAINS through email and the complains get automatically forwarded to the appropriate person who can solve it.

Now the interesting part is "We required that our project should automatically post or send emails to the users whenever there is any change in the state of their complain." Truly speaking this was the hardest part in our project. We got a lot of problem regarding setting up the Email facility.

We tried a lot of SMTP settings for Oracle APEX but each setting resulted in some type of error or problem. Many of the time "The mail sent today were delivered after 2 days that too into the SPAM". 

The Application delivered the email messages to teh APEX Mail Queue but on sending the messages from the Queue we faced various new problems ... SMTP transient error, TLS error and sumtime no error ( mail also dont get delivered ).

Sending the email was the crucial part of our Project.

We were having our Project Exhibition at our College on 24th April but to the date "22nd April" there was no functionality of email in our application. Now it was 23rd April and i started working to solve the problem.

Now being a "DotNet GUY :-)" or a .NET GUY , i decided 2 solve this problem using .NET. I wrote a WebService to send an email .....

Did some addition of Settings to the Web.config for SMTP Settings ...

Now i was able 2 consume this service and send mail. I tested it locally in ASP .NET environment. I grabbed my friend "Rahul Desai's BSNL USB Modem" and used it 2 send the email. I was not in a mood 2 goto Reading Hall n use the WiFi so used my friends modem at my room.

Now the work became so easy and i consumed the same WebService to my APEX Environment.

and it was very easy to send email through APEX.

On 24th we were very happy as the Email sending was now working with our application but again a new problem.


Just before the Exhibition was going 2 start, we tested our email sending module using the WiFi network at our college but again PROBLEM PROBLEM PROBLEM .... certain email smtp and pop ports are blocked under our Proxy Setting of WiFi network (even we aren't able 2 configure our email accounts through Outlook ).


Now again i started thinking the solution 2 this problem and suddenly "A BLINK OF THOUGHT CAME 2 MY MIND" ..... i didn't knew whether this will solve my problem but i wanted 2 try.


I again grabbed my friend's modem and uploaded the WebService application to my domain. Again my domain control panel is blocked at the WiFi so i used the USB modem.


Now it was the final testing n i typed my WebService's url 2 my address bar n following is the result ...

So now i was able to send EMAIL through my ORACLE APEX application and that too using the WiFi network.


This is how the WebService saved my day !!!


This was an awesome and strategic experience of mine ..... so i wanted 2 share it with everyone ..


- Aashish Singh Negi


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