Easy to Generate & Maintain Email (ABAP + HTML templates) – easyHtmlEmail

Hello All,

Today, I’ll try to demonstrate quite easy way to generate and send email using ABAP.

(It’s my first blog post, please point out the scope of improvements I may need. Thank you)

From start of my ABAP journey, I always felt bad about the way e-mails are generated & managed by ABAP. Recently I got chance to implement a project which also involved generating emails from scratch. I wanted customer facing e-mail to have modern look. Even plain text email using text-element/message class takes lots of efforts and makes the code lengthy, so it was a nightmare to me generate good looking modern email.

While searching web, I found the article demonstrating consumption of HTML template in ABAP: https://sap4tech.net/html-template-in-abap/. So I utilized this to generate modern e-mails for new project with really less ABAP code.

Since many of us may face similar issue, I wrote really small class zcl_easy_email on top of FM WWW_HTML_MERGER to make the email generation easy in ABAP for others .

Here’s my small contribution to Community:

Github Repository : easyHtmlEmail 

Repo contains report zeasy_email_demo demonstrates the consumption of zcl_easy_email to generate email.

Steps to generate Email with HTML templates:

• Build HTML templates for email & upload it in SAP system in SMW0.

Template must contain Placeholders for dynamic values (highlighted in yellow are placeholders)

HTML template – Master	HTML template – Child

PS: I am not so good in HTML & CSS , HTML templates used in demo are take from BBBootstrap public templates

I am using a Master & child template to generate a email with reusability in mind. Templates upload in SMW0:

Template uploaded in SMW0

• Create instance of zcl_easy_email and pass in the template names

DATA : go_EASY_EMAIL TYPE REF TO ZCL_EASY_EMAIL.

CREATE OBJECT go_EASY_EMAIL .

go_EASY_EMAIL->set_subject(
    title = 'mail subject '
 ).
go_EASY_EMAIL->set_template(
  EXPORTING
      p_template       = 'ZTESTEMAIL'
      p_mastertemplate = 'ZTESTEMAILMASTER'
 ).

• Pass in Placeholder & dynamic value pairs

go_EASY_EMAIL->replace_placeholder(
  EXPORTING
    placeholder_name = '!VBELN!'
    replacement_type = 'R'
    single_value     = ' 23412 '
).
go_EASY_EMAIL->replace_placeholder(
  EXPORTING
    placeholder_name = '!PRICE!'
    replacement_type = 'R'
    single_value     = ' 1234.90’
).

data : multi_line TYPE 
       soli_tab,                                                                                   
       line TYPE soli.

 line = 'LINE 1 : LINE1 </br>'.
 APPEND LINE to multi_line.
  line = 'LINE 2 : LINE2 </br>'.
 APPEND LINE to multi_line.

go_EASY_EMAIL->replace_placeholder(
  EXPORTING
    placeholder_name = '!LOG!'
    replacement_type = ' '
    multi_line       =  multi_line
).

• Build email , add recipients, send the mail

go_EASY_EMAIL->add_email( email = p_email ).
go_EASY_EMAIL->build_body( ).
go_EASY_EMAIL->send_mail( 'X' ).

• Email visible in SOST: place holders replaced with required values.

Generated E-mail visible in SOST

Restrictions:

• WWW_HTML_MERGER uses soli_tab to process data, so 255 character is the limit for each line in html template.
• SAP stores these HTML templates as RAW in INDX table, so we need to take care of character encoding while building the templates. In our system (BASIS 701) HTML template was stored in ISO-8859-2 encoding (code page 1401), so while building template encoding was selected asISO-8859-2 in text editor. Incorrect encoding will lead to character conversion issue.

Additional Info: SAP has provide something similar to this in S/4 suite, refer: E-Mail Templates in S/4 HANA

Please correct me if mistaken at some point, also suggest improvement points

Feel free to clone the repo in sandbox system using abapgit.

I hope the this blog post will be helpful. If you have questions/suggestions/issues about this, please feel free to leave them in the comments section.

If you know some good solution for emails, please mention it in comments below. ( lets keep all  email solutions on single page 😜 )

Update:

Added attachment functionality

Ability to handle error & custom action by exporting instance of cl_bsc from method build_mail()