We've used a custom TNEW order confirmation e-mail, generated via SQL and dependent on SOAP, since late 2012, and are seeing the end of the life of that particular process approaching with the arrival of v16. This has set our minds to wondering:
While we have some time, we are interested in considering just about any option.
Missing seeing some of you at TLCC and talking about stuff like this...
We use TNEW standard receipts, They are fine, they get the job done. I wish we made them look nicer. We use Wordfly to do Acknowledgements the day after the donation...We were having too much trouble trying to match donation to donation through Wordfly, so we just figured it would be easier to do a general acknowledgement on wordfly and keep the specifics in the TNEW Receipt.
If anyone has any solutions I am also interested !
I've made a few posts recently in the Ticketing & Customer Service forum about my explorations in this area -- this thread elaborates a bit on the technical setup I've come up with: https://community.tessituranetwork.com/tessitura_software_forums/f/tessitura_ticketing-0/26935/pre-show-email-via-html-template
I'm pretty happy with the overall infrastructure and scheduling -- I'm not taking over completely from the SOAP TNEW confirmation, but I'm adding post-order confirmations to specific events via HTML templates. And rather than figure out how to actually design an email using the HTML Templates editor, I've just figured out how to "outsource" the HTML generation to the WordFly editor -- this is described in more detail at the link above.
Where I think the whole system is lacking is in the design authoring stage, unfortunately. I've started dreaming up scenarios where one could use the Razor template to generate an intermediate markup language like MJML or HEML, and then register a service interceptor on the Templates/Render/* endpoints which would run the appropriate post-processing transformations to generate client-safe email HTML from that intermediate language. I just don't think any of us should have to be writing table-based HTML with inlined styles by hand in 2021.
Nick Reilingh said:I just don't think any of us should have to be writing table-based HTML with inlined styles by hand in 2021.
Agreed.
You can kind of turn WordFly into something that approximates a queue where you specify specific data for each queued email, but it's a pretty ugly hack. It's what I use for preshow emails (presented TLCC 2019: https://fcnick.page.link/email). Basically you would set up an output set and criteria that exclusively references a custom view, and you would write this view from scratch to return a different dataset each day (depending on what is "queued" for that day), one row per email, with exactly the data that you want to be included in each email. You probably will also need some other stored procedure running in a SQL Agent Job to do the actual queueing, and maintain some amount of state so you know which gifts have already been ack'd and when you need to delay an ack by a day to prevent having two rows with the same email address appear in your output... Did I say it was an ugly hack?
Queueing rows to the the REST email template queue yourself in SQL is a lot more straightforward, but you lose out on the ease of design that WordFly gives you.
I was told about a month ago that we couldn't send TNEW order confirmation via REST yet. Can someone confirm?
Ashley
You're correct Ashley. TNEW will offer support for REST templates starting in version 16. I hope you all can come to today's Open Studio, or catch the recording, because we will give some extra focus and previews on this topic.