Creating and using email templates

Email templates are pre-defined files that serve as a base to create and send emails. Email templates might include images and text that you can reuse without needing to create them from scratch every time. These templates helps you save time, maintain a consistent format, and improve productivity. 

Email templates serve two main functions for incoming and outgoing messages:

  • For incoming messages (email that users send to an incoming mailbox), users can include templates in their emails that contain specially formatted instructions. These instructions use combinations of field labels and their values usually referred to as label/value pairs. The Email Engineparses (that is, translates) these instructions into commands to the AR System serverto perform a query, submit or modify an entry, or complete any other such action.
  • For outgoing messages (sent by the Email Engineby using an outgoing mailbox), templates can provide formatting of content in messages that include the results of queries or various other requests.

Related topic

Enabling-users-to-interact-with-AR-System-through-email

Labels are keywords unique in theEmail Engine, and values are their data. Label/value pairs can be included in templates and used to instruct the Email Engine to interact with your AR System server.

Best practice

The term template might be misleading because email templates are more than simply the pattern of label/value pairs you export by using Developer Studio. A variety of email templates also function as the actual headers, footers, and content of your email messages.

Templates used for incoming and outgoing messages can be formatted by using plain text, HTML, or XML. Templates are defined and stored in forms on the AR System serverand can be retrieved for use by the Email Enginewhen called upon by incoming or outgoing mail.

Tips for creating email templates

You might find the following tips helpful when using email templates:

  • Diary fields and character fields with a maximum length of over 50 characters can use multiple lines of text.
  • Values can be entered anywhere after the delimiting character. Leading and trailing blanks are ignored when the Email Enginereads a value.
  • Comments are optional. Because the Email Engineignores any lines that do not contain a valid label/value pair, you do not have to add a # symbol in front of comments.
  • If the user does not enter a value into a field that has a default value defined, then the default value is loaded. If the user does not enter a value into a required field and there is no default value defined for it, an error will result.
  • Inline images in an email are not visible if you send an email using the email template that uses an attachment that has a name different than the name of the image file attachment. Therefore, you must make sure that the attachment name and image file name are the same for inline images.

See the topics listed in the following table for information and instructions about creating and using templates for outgoing and incoming emails:

Action

Reference

Learn about the different types of templates you can create and use for incoming and outgoing emails.

Learn how to export email templates by using Developer Studio.

Learn how you can customize the email templates to suit your requirements.

Learn about the different label/value pairs available with the email templates.

Learn how you can use variables in email templates that take the values dynamically at runtime.

Learn how to add a template to the AR System Email Templates form to use it repeatedly.

Learn how you can add an attachment to an email template.

Learn how you can add user instructions to email templates to automate user actions.

Review a few email template examples.

 

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