I needed to send out an email to members of a billing group in my Community Server Business App when a job was marked complete. I could have done something simple, but I wanted to do something cool and dig a bit deeper in the API since I had the opportunity. So I created a new emails.xml <email /> template and populated those template email tokens with data from custom objects. Here's the email that is produced before I get into the geeky details.
Notice the nice HTML formatting. I typically duplicate the site's styling whenever I add email services to an application, which is what I've tried to do here. CS2007's support for HTML email is also much improved over earlier versions, so there's actually a lot you can do with email formatting now.
Below is the template I added to the /languages/emails/emails.xml file. You'll notice that [PM], [Jobno] and [Job] are original email tokens we'll need to populate when generating the JobComplete emailType.
I wrote an email provider to handle the email processing. It wasn't necessary to construct it as a provider, but I wanted to stay as close to the original Mailroom model as possible. The Mailroom XmlEmailTemplateProvider reads in the emails.xml file, so all I had to do was handle the [PM], [Jobno] and [Job] tokens.
Then to populate those tokens I used the CS EmailTemplate provider with a custom EmailType (JobEmailType.JobComplete) and called the EmailHelper GetJobPostFields() method above.
