Email bodies with conditional content

[Uncle Rob]

So I have a legal team which has all kinds of conditional text they want to send depending on conditions of submission.

That is...

if you submit with X checked, include messagetext1 in email body

If you submit with Y checked, include messagetext2 in email body

If you submit with Z checked, include messagetext3 in email body

... and so on.

I want to handle this with one notification if I can.   I know I can call an email script to do all the logic evaluation, but its not a nice way to work with text (would prefer Rich HTML editor).   So my question is, can a mail   script call an email template that acts as a *component* of a body, rather than the entire email?

[Uncle Rob]

The idea is something like this:  

Notification:

Subject:   Thanks for requesting legal intervention

Body:

bla bla bla

{mail_script:body_builder}

Email Script (body_builder)

if current.checkbox1 = true

  template.print(template1)

if current.checkbox2 = true

template.print(teplate2)

... and so on.

[arpitt]

I Hope this helps.

http://wiki.servicenow.com/?title=Scripting_for_Email_Notifications#Overriding_Email_Fields

Regards,

Arpit Taneja

[Uncle Rob]

Definitely using scripts to drive the logic.   The problem is the output of the script is (hopefully), rich HTML.   Since email script is a javascript editor, that makes it a little more clunky to work with formatted text.

[jason_mckee]

Just spitballing here, but what if you created a Template Component table to manage your HTML fragments in like:

Component - Choice (checkbox1,checkbox2...etc.)

Fragment - HTML

then have your email body_builder script along the flavor of:

var checkboxes = (checkbox1 ? 'checkbox1' : '') + ',' + (checkbox2 ? 'checkbox2' : '')

var gr = new GlideRecord('x_template_components');

gr.addQuery('component','IN',checkboxes);

gr.orderBy('component');

gr.query();

while(gr.next()) {

      template.print(gr.fragment);

}

Then you get a rich HTML editor for your fragments, but it's still all data driven.   I'd got a bit further and add in a reference to which email/template the fragments are associated with and maybe an Order field so you can have multiple content fragments associated with the same checkbox.   I've seen a similar structure used in contract management applications to generate contract boilerplate for different use cases.

Shades of the disaster recovery Task templates we did in ApocalypseNow.