PriMailer

Priority HTML emails

Priority sending emails plan:

First thing to do is to come up with types of HTML template messages In our case there are 3 types for 3 statuses of online orders places by customer:

• Pending Approval
• Confirmed
• Shipped

In order to create HTML template we are going to need few things which each of templates consists of:

• Static data: just a text which is written once for each template and doesn't get to be changed.
• Dynamic data(name/order number/order date) which is SELECTed from client's Database.
• Static images such as company logo which stays the same on each of templates.
• Dynamic images such as order statuses.

Create procedure for storing our HTML templates created earlier

Create another procedure responsible for and write a SQL statement, which would:

• SELECT all required data and put it into declared above variables.
• Those variables would be passed into relevant variables of our HTML template .
• Send each HTML template based on business logic to customer's emails.

Step_1: Uploading images

1. Find all the images needed and upload them to the virtual folder on the client's IIS server. Open IIS manager --> Sites --> Default Web Sits --> find or create folder for storing images --> primail --> images

   

2. Create a link for each image you stored by simply copying WEB path of each of them.

   

3. Save all the links for each image somewhere as you will need them further to pass into HTML templates in our case there are and corresponding to order number and customer name.

Step_2: Creating HTML templates

1. Build your HTML templates in regards to client's requirement. In our case there are 3 templates for different online order statuses such as "Pending Approval", "Confirmed", "Shipped"

2. Define what data would be dynamic (taken from client's database) and highlight it as we will need to swap this data for parameters(variables) to which we assign SELECTed fields from client's DB.

   

Step_3: Creating Procedure for holding HTMLS

1. So, go to procedure generator, and create procedure which only purpose will be to store our HTMLs in our case it's called ZTMD_EMAILS with Templates description.

   

2. Go to sublevel form Procedure Steps and create a SQLI entity.

   

3. Go to sub form Step Query and create just 1 line with comments tags /* */ The reason we are doing that is to get to the Procedure messages which is the sub form to SQLI entity only! But because we don't need any SQL statement here, we leave it as a comment string as we still need to put something in this form to get to the Procedure messages.

   

4. Go to sub form Procedure Messages. Here we are going to load our HTML templates. Create records and name them correspondingly with our HTML templates names. Very important is to leave the first line !!! EMPTY !!! because: The blank step is required to tell the sendmail command that it's using the temp file as the body, rather than as an attachment otherwise our templates will not be shown as actual email format page, it would be considered as attachment(pdf, docx).

   

5. Go to sub form Procedure Messages(content) for each of HTML and insert our HTMLs accordingly.

   • Make sure your HTML tags and it's contents are all aligned by left side before you paste it, there should be no white spaces or new line symbols.
   • To do that go to where your HTML was written(VScode in our case) --> open HTML template --> press "ctrl + H" and make 3 steps to remove spare symbols:
     • replace all \n[ ]+ with
     • replace all < with \n<
     • replace all \n\n with \n

Step_4: Creating Procedure for Sending Emails

Getting values we are going to include in our HTML templates:

1. Go to procedure generator, and create procedure which will select all dynamic data from DB and send it to customer (ZTMD_MAILTEST in our case).

2. Go to sub form Procedure Steps and create a SQLI entity.

3. Go to sub form Step Query pres F6 and open code editor. Okay, Lets split this code into a few sections for easier understanding:

   1. SELECT statement. Just selecting fields that we spoke about earlier as of dynamic data.

      

   2. Declaring Cursor and fetching selected fields into the so-called variables.

      

   3. Selecting these variables into Parameters used as a reserved variables in procedures. At this point we could have fetched our cursor straight into :PAR variables at the first place.

      

• Step_4.1: Email-Sending steps:

1. Declaring few self-explanatory variables such as :_REPLYTOEMAIL, :_Subject, :sendto.

   

2. Choosing HTML template by MSG number we defined earlier (Step_3: Creating Procedure for holding HTMLS[4])

   • As we defined MSG number against each of our HTML we just take this number and assign it to a :ENTMSG variable, also we assign :ENT = 'ZTMD_EMAILS' name of procedure to entity variable and :ENTTYPE = 'P' as Procedure type for our ZTMD_EMAILS procedure.

   

3. Creating temporary file.html and assign it to :TMPFILE (SELECT STRCAT(SQL.TMPFILE , '.html') INTO :TMPFILE FROM DUMMY)

   • #INCLUDE MAILBOX/ZTMD_BUF1 this line is reading our :TMPFILE.html looking for every parameter(<P>) in it.

   

   • MAILMSG 20 TO EMAIL :sendto DATA :TMPFILE in this line we actually tell what email we are sending HTML to TO EMAIL :sendto and what would be in it DATA :TMPFILE, note that MAILMSG 20 is a required blank step which tells our procedure to send HTML as a body rather then an attachment file.

4. Looping back to LABEL 1, closing labels 8 and 9 and closing our cursor.