Magento Automatically send tracking email - email

Question

OK, been searching this everywhere, and can't come up with anything... we are externally populating tracking numbers in Magento Community 1.7.0.2 via a sync program from Dydacomp's Mail order Manager software... - it closes the order in Magento and adds a tracking number, but does not trigger the send tracking email function in mage. - I have researched, and seen that there are observers, etc. which appear maybe to be able to do this, but after 20 hours scouring every blog I can find, etc. cannot come up with anything that works!
This link seems to be REALLY in the right direction... but where to put this block of code? I've tried putting it in all kinds of places and none works:
Programmaticly send email when shipping tracking number is set
Any help would be tremendously appreciated.

Answer 1

I developed something similar. I created a module activated by cron (once a day) that checks the last orders that have 'delivered' (complete status).
To run a function in your cron magento module, add to your config.xml
<crontab>
<jobs>
<myModule_myFunction>
<schedule><cron_expr>*/60 * * * *</cron_expr></schedule>
<run><model>emailtracker/cron::myFunction</model></run>
</myModule_myFunction>
</jobs>
</crontab>
For the order to have supplies you can use the following code snippet
$orders = Mage::getModel('sales/order')->getCollection()
->addFieldToFilter('status', 'complete')
->addAttributeToFilter('created_at', array('gteq' => $dataForFilter));
Note that the collection of orders that I created, I make filter by date to avoid retrieving all orders already made​​.
With my collection of recent and complete orders that are possible candidates to receive a tracking email delivery, I can actually work with the orders that are important.
I created a foreach to run in my collection and within that loop, retrieve the tracking number.
foreach($orders as $order) {
$trackings = Mage::getResourceModel('sales/order_shipment_track_collection')
->setOrderFilter($order)
->getData();
for($i=0;$i<count($trackings);$i++) {
$trackingNumber = $trackings[$i]['track_number'];
//Make your php magic here
}
}
From this point, you can work this information the way you want. You can create a function that checks the status of tracking number via API and its delivery service sends an email, or you can imagine.
Important: Remember to check if your magento cron is active.
Note: I did it in Magento 1.6.1.0