How to send messages to a list of recipients with one SQL insert command
This guide gives you instructions, to setup a configuration, that
allows you to send messages to a list of recipients by executing only
one insert query for the message. It is based on the
SQL to SMS
configuration and implements the functionality using SQL.
If you have setup the database user you already have an
ozekimessagin and
an ozekimessageout database table in your database server.
To send messages to a group of recipients with only one insert statement,
you will
need to two more database tables. One table will hold a list of all recipients
and another will hold information about which recipient belongs to which group.
The table definitions for these tables are shown on Figure 1.
CREATE TABLE groups (
groupname varchar(30),
fullname varchar(30)
);
Figure 1 - SQL Create table definitions
To test the functionality we will need to add some test data into these tables:
INSERT INTO recipients (fullname,phonenumber) VALUES ('gyula','111111');
INSERT INTO recipients (fullname,phonenumber) VALUES ('peter','222222');
INSERT INTO recipients (fullname,phonenumber) VALUES ('erik','333333');
INSERT INTO recipients (fullname,phonenumber) VALUES ('sonyja','444444');
INSERT INTO recipients (fullname,phonenumber) VALUES ('lis','555555');
INSERT INTO groups (groupname,fullname) VALUES ('friends','gyula');
INSERT INTO groups (groupname,fullname) VALUES ('friends','lis');
INSERT INTO groups (groupname,fullname) VALUES ('enemies','peter');
INSERT INTO groups (groupname,fullname) VALUES ('enemies','sonyja');
INSERT INTO groups (groupname,fullname) VALUES ('classmates','lis');
INSERT INTO groups (groupname,fullname) VALUES ('classmates','peter');
INSERT INTO groups (groupname,fullname) VALUES ('classmates','erik');
Figure 2 - SQL test data
To be able to send a message to a group we need to modify the SQL query in the
"Polling" tab of the "SQL for sending" tab of the "Database user" configuration
form in the
Ozeki NG SMS Gateway user interface. This query selects messages from the
ozekimessageout database table by default. It will be modified to query that will
use data from the newly created tables: recipients and groups. The modified
query will be:
Change this: SELECT id,sender,receiver,msg,msgtype,operator FROM ozekimessageout
WHERE status='send'
To this: SELECT a.id,a.sender,b.phonenumber,a.msg,a.msgtype,a.operator
FROM ozekimessageout a, recipients b, groups c
WHERE (a.receiver=c.groupname) and (c.fullname=b.fullname) and
(a.status='send')
Figure 3 - Modify the SQL SELECT query
The modified query will collect the telephone numbers from the recipients table
using the
group name. To send a message to a group you would use the following SQL command:
INSERT INTO ozekimessageout (receiver,msg,status) VALUES ('friends','Hello
world','send');
Figure 3 - Modify the SQL SELECT query
Note that in this SQL command we provide the group name 'friends' instead of
a telephone number.
