Rendering Templates

Rendering of templates

Event payloads

Templates are rendered with payloads triggered by the Event Action Manager. The incoming payload will be scoped in a data object, so in case of an order payload the order data would begin at data.order.

There's also some details available about the EventActionConfig that triggered the event under config.

Using custom queries

In some cases you may need additional data that is not yet available in the original event payload, for instance when you want to personalize a password reset email, or when you want to include product image in the OrderConfirmation email.

For this we have to option to enrich your data with a customQuery. The query is executed against the Propeller GraphQL API (with viewer role on all scopes). The queryVariables are the variables used in the GraphQL query, this field supports handlebars variables and is the only field that is rendered only the original event payload. Any other field with handlebars support is rendered with a payload that also include the results of the custom query. After rendering, the result of the queryVariables value, must be a valid json string.

After the customQuery is executed, the results will be scoped under custom.

Example

In this example we want to enrich a password reset email payload, to include firstName, middleName, lastName and gender of the Contact or Customer so we can a personalized salutation to the email.

So the incoming event payload would looks like this:

{
    "data": {
        "passwordReset": {
            "email": "John.Doe@example.com",
            "redirectLink": "https://www.example.com/reset-password",
            "language": "NL"
        }
    },
    "config": {
        "id": "56c30108-17b5-41ce-9841-1e587de30ad2",
        "emailTemplateId": "b51aa070-d08c-43da-8fc2-ce13a3cb2d77"
    }
}

We create a custom query to fetch the fields from the Contact or Customer from the GraphQL API based on the email address in the event payload:

    query resetPasswordCustom($login: String) {
        user(login: $login) {
            type: __typename
            email
            firstName
            lastName
            middleName
            gender
        }
    }

Then you add queryVariables that supplies the $login variable from the event payload

{ "login": "{{data.passwordReset.email}}" }

After the customQuery is executed this then result in a complete payload that is used in all other fields with handlebars support that looks like this:

{
    "data": {
        "passwordReset": {
            "email": "John.Doe@example.com",
            "redirectLink": "https://www.example.com/reset-password",
            "language": "NL"
        }
    },
    "config": {
        "id": "56c30108-17b5-41ce-9841-1e587de30ad2",
        "emailTemplateId": "b51aa070-d08c-43da-8fc2-ce13a3cb2d77"
    },
    "custom": {
        "user": {
            "type": "Contact",
            "fistName": "John",
            "middleName": "Michael",
            "lastName": "Doe",
            "gender": "M"
        }
    }
}

This would allow you to add a salutation in your template like this:

<p>Dear {{#if (eq customer.user.gender "M")}}Sir{{else}}Madam{{/if}} {{glue " " customer.user.firstName customer.user.middleName customer.user.lastName}}</p>

Preview / Standalone rendering

The API offers the opportunity to render/send templates standalone without the event triggering them. This can be useful for previewing or just rendering and sending a template as a standalone feature.

Since in this case there is no event providing the payload, you will need to populate the payload by yourself. Note, the custom queries will still be execute, so if there's any dynamic variables in the queryVariables this will still need to have values that exist.

There are 3 mutations available in the API to do this.

Mutation	Description
templateRenderToHTML	Renders the template's content to HTML. Can be use for both EmailTemplate and DocumentTemplate
emailTemplateRenderAndSend	Will Render the template and send it as email. Useful if you want to preview the content in your email client. Will use the emailTemplates tos, ccs and bccs field. So you may want to overwrite those to hardcoded values while testing
documentTemplateRenderToPDF	Render the template to PDF and return it as a Base64File object, which includes the fileName, base64 content and contentType (application/pdf)

The input for these mutation are the ID is the template your wish to render/send and TemplateRenderInput which includes the payload as data. Note the JSON value is also scope within a data variable, so you will probably need to create a nested data object in your custom payload. So the for example the order payload would look like this data.data.order.