Tip for adding custom email templates to output forms

Hi Community

Just thought I would share a bit of extra knowledge on how to create a simple customised email template and assign it to various output forms. It took me a while to get it working so I hope this saves you a little time.

I write this with reference to ByDesign release 1402.

The on-line help page “Form Template Maintenance Quick Guide” gives you a good start-for-ten on how to achieve this, but I would just like to add an important point when saving your template in HTM/HTML format:

* If you use MS Word to create your template, make sure you save it in the right HTML format. Use “Web Page, Filtered” (if using MS Word 2010), and not the one named just “Web Page”:

The reason for this is that if you want to insert variable data into the body of the email text like, for example, the Invoice ID, then you have to insert the ‘token’ (or placeholder) for that piece of information in between square brackets, like this:

The attached PDF contains the detail for invoice [CustomerInvoice-ID].

And if you save the template in the “Web Page” format instead of “Web Page, Filtered”, then not only do you get a much larger template file to upload, but these special tokens (placeholders) also will not work.

Once you have uploaded the email template to your chosen form, and then – in your document – when you come to look at the email text after clicking on “You Can Also > Edit Output Settings”, you will see all the hideous HTML code from the template. Don’t worry! It will not look like that when the recipient gets the email:

So that’s my nugget of info for the day: save the template in the “Web Page, Filtered” format!

Attached is a small example of an email template for Customer Invoices which includes the output of the invoice ID, the total invoice amount, and the invoice date.

Hope this is useful to someone!

Tim