Personal Insights
Enterprise class E-Mails from ABAP , using Rich Text Editor
Alert : Duplicate content / Idea
What is this blog all about?
Is it easy to draft and send enterprise class e-mails from ABAP ? Yes I would say . This blog is all about what I did to send a good looking( to my eyes ) sales summary report via email.
Challenges in drafting HTML Body for E-Mails .
- Only inline CSS are supported in the HTML tags
- no external css files are allowed in the document
- All CSS features are not supported by outlook
- Its difficult to string manipulate and generate the HTML document from ABAP
What we did
First Step – Using MS Word ( thanks ) to design
Open Microsoft word and draft the e-mail structure the way you want . Better we center align all the content so that it will look better in mobile / tablet as well. We can use images , text arts , and possibly all the basic features to style your document.
Second Step – Place variables in the document
Now , our design is ready. Change all the dynamic part of it using variable name. I used $$VARIABLENAME$$ format. You can choose the way you like. Like the below.
Third Step – get HTML corresponding to the Word document
Its simple. User a RichTextEditor from SAPUI5 library / or use the editor from SCN . Or may be any free Rich Text Editor.
Copy paste the word content to the rich editor and get the HTML correspondingly .
Step 4 : store this HTML content in SAP and dynamically replace the variables from a program .
I developed a module pool application to capture this HTML content and store the document in a string field of a table. From the program, I fetch the data and replace the HTML variables dynamically with program variables.
and you get replaced variables in the HTML that can be used as mail body.
Enjoy Innovating..
Sreehari
Hello
Isn’t this comparable to SAP e-mail templates ? E-mail templates do hold HTML and variables. The composing of the final mail and the substitution of the variables is by API CL_SMTG_EMAIL_API in the RENDER** methods.
Regards Jack
Yes - variable replacement is easy with this. Thanks for this hint! I completely forgot this one. The idea I wanted to present was about the e-mail template. We can ask the stakeholders to provide us the e-mail template in a word document and we can use it directly as mail body.