Templates

Templates are text files, which can contain plain text, or html, and have within them embedded substitutions within {{ and }}.

An example substitution would be {{name}} which will then be replaced at generate time by providing "name":"fred" in the json data.

There are a number of system substitutions which are prefixed with system. and these are detailed below.

For the purposes of HTML email, all images *should* be included as base64 encoded data rather than remote images, because many email clients will block these now.

Anywhere Goes

Substitution can happen anywhere in the document, and in the email subject line. You can leverage substitution to control things like html classes, styles and mode, but be aware that you cannot include " in these variables (limitations of JSON). You can for example have:

  This is the message

Assuming you've defined the value of msgclass in the style section of the document. You can use styles also:

  Message

Anything Goes

You can supply html as a substitution, for example {{table1}} could be substituted with the HTML for a table with content. This is used extensively to provide tabular content into templates. Care should be taken to properly encode any HTML so it doesn't corrupt the JSON and cause failures.

The flexibility is almost limitless, and once the template is registered, generating emails is extremely simple. The majority of GEN's notification emails are generated using this framework

System Substitution Parameters

The following system parameters can be used in templates using the syntax {{system.parameter_name}}:

Apply

These system parameters can be used in both the email body and subject line.

Concatenation and Placement

There is no white-space introduced around substitutions, allowing concatenation, for example {{system.quarter}}{{system.year}} would render Q42024.