Administration Guide

Creating HTML E-mail Templates

If you plan to use E-mail Notifications in HTML format, it may be useful for you to have HTML e-mail templates. An HTML template includes the standard HTML markup, static content, as well as placeholders for dynamic content and data.

Templates eliminate the need to manually design every notification and enforce a standard appearance of your notifications. You can create individual templates for each type of notification used in your workflow, such as invitations, reports, reminders, etc., and then apply them to specific E-mail Notifications. HTML templates are applicable across all object classes.

NOTE: The appearance of E-mail Notifications in HTML format is controlled by standard cascading style sheet (CSS) rules. For details, see Customizing the style of E-mail Notifications.

The default workflow provides several ready-to-use HTML e-mail templates. You can use them as is, customize them as needed, or create your own templates from scratch.

To create an HTML e-mail template:

  1. From the Sidebar, navigate to Notifications > E-mail Notifications > HTML Templates.

  2. Click New to bring up the E-mail Template dialog box.

  3. You can use the integrated visual HTML editor to design your template. The editor provides common tools for text formatting and displays the resulting appearance of the template.

    Alternatively, you may click Design > HTML Code and type in the source HTML code. You can use third-party tools to design your template and then paste its HTML code into the text box. After editing the HTML code, you can click HTML Code > Design to see how your template will look like.

  4. Add sections to your template. Sections are special placeholders for common elements of an e-mail notification: greeting, body, footer, etc. Sections define the general structure of notifications based on this template. You will specify the content for each section later, when customizing particular E-mail Notifications. Placeholders for content sections have the SEC prefix, such as %[SEC Header]%.

    To insert a section, place the cursor in the position where you want to insert it, click Insert Section, and select a section. You can use up to ten sections in every HTML template: Header, Greeting, Sidebar, Body, Footer, and Section 1 - Section 5.

  5. If you want to insert an element common to all HTML e-notifications based on this template, place the cursor in the position where you want the element to appear and type your text.

    To insert a placeholder for dynamic content (a macro), click Insert Placeholder and choose a macro that will be replaced with the actual value at runtime.

    INFO: For details, see Inserting Placeholders.

    NOTE: If you want to see in details a User Macro or a Workflow Parameter referenced by the placeholder, right-click the selected placeholder and choose Placeholder Definition. It reveals the Macro (Workflow Parameter) window. If necessary, update the details and click OK. The placeholder would be updated with new values.

  6. Click OK.

When you do not need a template, you can delete it.

NOTE: A template can be deleted only when there are no E-mail Notifications based on this template.