Specifying message text, subjects, and recipients in external files

The Role_Email collaboration template allows the contents of the Retail_Item attributes that specify e-mail message and subject text and recipients to contain the names of files.

Flow

These files contain the actual e-mail message text, subject text, and addresses, and can be modified without modifying the using collaboration objects. This feature permits messages, subjects, and recipients to be shared among multiple collaboration objects.

A Role_Email collaboration object distinguishes whether the content of the Retail_Item attributes are actual values or filenames through use of its FILE_NAME_PREFIX configuration property. If the value of the Retail_Item attribute specified in the MSG_TEXT_ATTRIBUTE, MSG_SUBJECT_ATTRIBUTE, or MSG_RECIPIENT_ATTRIBUTE property is prefixed with the String specified in FILE_NAME_PREFIX, the Role_Email collaboration object interprets the rest of the value as a filename. The collaboration object reads the value of the file into a String variable in preparation for further processing. Files must be identified by their fully qualified names.

Example of specifying an e-mail recipient

For example, if the filename containing the e-mail recipients is
c:\Email_Files\CategoryManagerRole.txt 
and the value of FILE_NAME_PREFIX is @, then set the value of the Retail_Item attribute identified by the MSG_RECIPIENT_ATTRIBUTE property to:
@c:\Email_Files\CategoryManagerRole.txt

If the values of the Retail_Item attributes specified in the MSG_TEXT_ATTRIBUTE, MSG_SUBJECT_ATTRIBUTE, and MSG_RECIPIENT_ATTRIBUTE properties do not start with the string specified in FILE_NAME_PREFIX, the Role_Email collaboration object obtains the e-mail values directly from the attributes. If the Retail_Item attributes for message text or subject text contain no values, the Role_Email collaboration object supplies default values for them.

Parent topic: Overall process logic