Output Elements/Set for WordFly Triggered Emails

Piling on, because why not: I'm actually implementing triggered performance reminders with WordFly right now at my organization. We wanted to do some pretty complex logic with regard to grouping multiple performances into single emails, while also making sure the email deploys no earlier than two days before the first performance in the group, and never sends the same performance to a customer twice. I've opted to do this with a two-step process. First, a "queuing" process runs every day that adds rows to a local table indicating which perf/customer pairs are to be sent today. (So if a customer has 6 performances in a weekend — yes, we actually do this — starting on Friday, the whole weekend will get queued the Wednesday prior.) Then, when WordFly does its daily list and output set pull, it gets the customers that were "queued" earlier in the day, and the output set rolls up all of the performance information for the customer (date/time, running time, venue, maps URL, other notes from content types) for ALL of his/her performances into a big ball of HTML that goes into a single data field in the WordFly template. We were originally going to output the perf information in multiple column sets, but WordFly can't do conditionals on data fields that contain other data fields. Frankly, I think it's a lot simpler this way; generating HTML from SQL isn't really that terrible. And it really would have been hell to deal with dozens of almost-identically-named data fields to cover multiple performances.

Piling on, because why not: I'm actually implementing triggered performance reminders with WordFly right now at my organization. We wanted to do some pretty complex logic with regard to grouping multiple performances into single emails, while also making sure the email deploys no earlier than two days before the first performance in the group, and never sends the same performance to a customer twice. I've opted to do this with a two-step process. First, a "queuing" process runs every day that adds rows to a local table indicating which perf/customer pairs are to be sent today. (So if a customer has 6 performances in a weekend — yes, we actually do this — starting on Friday, the whole weekend will get queued the Wednesday prior.) Then, when WordFly does its daily list and output set pull, it gets the customers that were "queued" earlier in the day, and the output set rolls up all of the performance information for the customer (date/time, running time, venue, maps URL, other notes from content types) for ALL of his/her performances into a big ball of HTML that goes into a single data field in the WordFly template. We were originally going to output the perf information in multiple column sets, but WordFly can't do conditionals on data fields that contain other data fields. Frankly, I think it's a lot simpler this way; generating HTML from SQL isn't really that terrible. And it really would have been hell to deal with dozens of almost-identically-named data fields to cover multiple performances.

Hi Nick

Just saw your reply.

I actually did do this with multiple columns, and used the perf_no_X/prod_season_no_X field as the determining factor populating with NA when no performance.

Think I loaded up all my scripts for the dynamic view (table function) and the text for the wordfly template to the developer bit bucket account while I was at the NT

Mark