Java

Get the Number of Body Alternatives in an Email

Demonstrates the read-only Chilkat Email.NumAlternatives property, which is the number of body representations present in the email. A representation may be plain text, HTML, iCalendar, or another body format. A normal email with one body returns 1, while a multipart/alternative email returns the number of alternatives it contains. Alternative indexes used by methods such as GetAlternativeBody are zero-based. This example builds an email with plain-text and HTML alternatives and prints the count.

Background: MIME organizes a message as a tree of parts. multipart/alternative holds several versions of the same content (the client shows the best one it supports); multipart/mixed combines a body with attachments; and multipart/related bundles an HTML body with the inline images it references. A rich email nests these, for example:

multipart/mixed
  multipart/alternative
    text/plain
    multipart/related
      text/html
      image/png
  application/pdf

Here the text/plain part and the multipart/related part are the two alternatives.

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Chilkat2 Java

import com.chilkatsoft.chilkat2.Email;

public class ChilkatExample {

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        // Demonstrates the read-only Email.NumAlternatives property, which is the
        // number of body representations (plain text, HTML, iCalendar, etc.) in the email.

        Email email = new Email();

        // Set a plain-text body and add an HTML alternative.  This creates a
        // multipart/alternative email with two representations.
        email.setTextBody("This is the plain-text alternative.", "text/plain");
        email.addHtmlAlternativeBody("<html><body><b>This is the HTML alternative.</b></body></html>");

        // Alternative indexes (used by GetAlternativeBody) are zero-based.
        System.out.println("NumAlternatives = " + email.getNumAlternatives());
    }
}