Epicor IDC: E-mail Client App Can't Batch Subjects with Long Dash

Issue: Most of our IDC batches are auto-created from e-mail attachments via the IDC E-mail Client app. If the Unread e-mail’s Subject contains a LONG DASH [–], then the IDC E-mail Client marks the e-mail as Read, but fails to auto-create an IDC batch. There’s no notification to the IDC Admins. The only way to detect this issue (maybe) is to open some IDC alert log and search for its occurrence.

Q1: Has anyone else seen this issue?

Q2: Is anyone aware of other special characters, besides the LONG DASH [–], that can trigger this issue?

Background: When this app auto-creates an IDC batch from an e-mails attachment(s), the batch name includes the Subject and Sender of the e-mail that the app is intercepting. That’s per our configuration; yes, we could simply remove Subject from the batch name config.

Note: I don’t interact with Epicor Support directly. My support is via a consulting firm that installed our Epicor ECM & IDC applications. I think that’s considered a Professional Services (PS) partner? Anyhow, that consulting firm reported this issue to Ancora a few days ago.

Introduction: I support my company’s On Premises Epicor ECM (v21.1) & IDC (v9.11) applications. We don’t have Epicor ERP. While we already use Epicor ECM & IDC for other processes, we are implementing a targeted (small scale) AP Automation in IDC/ECM to load a small subset of AP invoices into our Dynamics GP ERP. I’ve been frustrated in my attempts to find any community where Epicor ECM & IDC [a.k.a. DocStar] discussions can occur. So I’ll post my topics here.

Can your app that received the subject string do a simple replace, to change the long dash to standard one?

Could it be the encoding used? Like the long dash is encoded using several bytes, and that throws off the parser.

Hi, Calvin. Thanks for responding.

It’s not my app. It’s an Epicor IDC Email Client app that IDC uses to retrieve e-mail attachments.
This Epicor IDC Email Client app provides some options (which IDC calls macros) for creating the batch name when retrieving from a specific e-mail account. Unfortunately, none of those IDC options (macros) includes any replace functionality for naming the auto-created IDC batch.

I’ve asked our customer service rep to ask our customer to stop including a long dash in the e-mail subject when sending us order PDFs. But that’s ridiculous – and embarrassing – that we even have to ask a customer that.

And, Calvin, you may be right about that character – the long dash – throwing off the parser. But Epicor’s IDC Email Client app is a Black Box and no admin guide is available to Admin Users like me. If the long dash is problematic, where does Epicor document a listing of such special characters that cause the batch creation to fail?

This is just one of many examples I can share which lead me to conclude: Epicor may be an impressive software company, but IDC is not ready for Prime Time use by enterprise customers.

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We have not had the issue, but I’m not sure we receive anything with the long dash.

However, my first thought would be an Exchange Transport rule, or a Client Side transform rule to re-write the subject without the dash. This is also assuming your email platform is Microsoft.

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Mike, I’m going to ask my Exchange Admin if an Exchange Transport rule could possibly replace a certain character in the Subject of an inbound e-mail. Thanks!

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If IDC can watch a folder then you can also have an Azure Logic App handle the email and rewrite the attachment name after saving it.

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Hi, Mark. Thanks for your suggestion.
At first glance, I think the Azure Logic App might address a separate IT need I have to automatically download e-mail attachments from a specific mailbox – if we were on Azure.

But IDC can’t watch a folder. And Mark’s suggestion to try to use an Exchange Transport rule might address our issue.

I think @Mark_Wonsil may have been referring to PowerApps (or whatever their name is now). Standard M/O365 users have access to Power Apps which can indeed process emails and do a large array of things to/with them.

The transport rules I mentioned have a much smaller set of of focused things they can do in comparsion.

Well, actually, I was referring to Logic Apps, which is the engine behind Power Automate - only way cheaper. First 4000 actions per month are free and then 0.000025 per action after that…

And if one were to go “all in” with Azure, they might use Logic Apps with Azure Form Recognizer for Invoices and pay 0.05USD/page. To move the file on-prem, it’ll cost you though - $0.000125 each time. So budget for it! :thinking:

This returns a JSON file that has all of the data from the form (including text on logos/pictures!). Next they would extract the required fields from the JSON file and format the .XML file and place both the XML file and the PDF in the uptake folder for regular DocStar AP Processing workflows.

No server to patch. No purchasing scans you might not need. Pay only for what you use. The service is segmented from the local network out of harms way. :man_shrugging:

Just a thought… :wink:

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@Mark_Wonsil See, I should keep my nose out of the Azure cloud stuff and leave that to you :slight_smile:

Thanks for the clarity sir - I didn’t know that service existed. I’m going to have to look into that and the different possibilities.

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