Pascal (Lazarus/Delphi)

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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Pascal (Lazarus/Delphi)

program ChilkatDemo;

// Demonstrates using the Chilkat Pascal wrapper via the C bridge DLL.
// Builds as a console application under Lazarus (FPC) or Delphi.

{$IFDEF FPC}
  {$MODE DELPHI}
{$ENDIF}
{$APPTYPE CONSOLE}

uses
  {$IFDEF UNIX}
  cthreads,
  {$ENDIF}
  SysUtils,
  CkDllLoader,
  Chilkat.Email;

// ---------------------------------------------------------------------------

procedure RunDemo;
var
  email: TEmail;

begin
  //  Demonstrates the read-only Email.NumAlternatives property, which is the
  //  number of body representations (plain text, HTML, iCalendar, etc.) in the email.

  email := TEmail.Create;

  //  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.
  WriteLn('NumAlternatives = ' + email.NumAlternatives);


  email.Free;

end;

// ---------------------------------------------------------------------------

begin

  try
    RunDemo;
  except
    on E: Exception do
      WriteLn('Unhandled exception: ', E.ClassName, ': ', E.Message);
  end;

  WriteLn;
  {$IFDEF MSWINDOWS}
  WriteLn('Press Enter to exit...');
  ReadLn;
  {$ENDIF}
end.