The email Action

Administration Guide : Trigger Set Configuration : The email Action

The email Action

The email Action provides more opportunity for customizing than any other Action shipped with Xinet. Each entry in an email Action Setting is a string that may include tagged names of Environment Variables to swap in. The tags are formatted like $VARIABLE or ${VARIABLE}, and if VARIABLE is available in the environment, the variable’s value is used instead (otherwise, $VARIABLE will remain). Though it is not necessary to “tokenize” these tags by including them in curly brackets ({}), Xinet recommends you do so for consistent results. The email Action is also used to notify users when a Trigger Set Action did not complete successfully.

The email Action can send plain text or HTML-formatted messages. If the Body field of an email Action Setting starts with either <html or <!doctype html, the email is presumed to be HTML-formatted. In this case, proper email headers are added to inform email-reading programs that the mail should be interpreted as HTML, and some variable replacements work differently (especially image attachments). Otherwise, the email Body is assumed to be plain text.

Additional Email Variables

In addition to the Environment Variables mentioned in The Action Environment, the email Action sets additional variables of its own, and the program that implements the email Action recognizes a few more. These include:

FOREACHFILE, ENDFOREACH

When triggered by an Aggregated Upload event, surround a section of the email body that will be repeated for each uploaded file. See the examples below for a possible email body.

FID

Venture File ID of FILENAME

PARENTID

Venture File ID of parent folder of FILENAME

XFILE

The filename and the path to it on the server. Equivalent to FILENAME and maintained for backwards compatibility only.

XFILESHORT

This is only the filename itself, without any path information.

XKEY

This is the name of the keyword used to initiate the Action.

XHTMLPATH

HTML-ready representation of the full path to the file. Equivalent to HTMLPATHNAME and maintained for backwards compatibility only.

XHTMLSHORT

The last file component of $HTMLPATHNAME.

XUSER

Xinet user name. Equivalent to USERNAME and maintained for backwards compatibility only.

XFID

This is the Xinet FileID associated with $PATHNAME. It will be 0 if the database FileID can’t be determined.

XWNUSEREMAIL

This is the email address of the user who committed the trigger that caused the Action (which is normally set in the $USERNAME environment variable). If that user doesn’t have an email address stored in the Xinet database, this is equivalent to $USERNAME.

XWNUSERMAILTO

This is the Upload email address for $USERNAME, if set, or the default Upload email address, if set. If neither are set, the variable string will remain untouched. If both are set, the user’s own setting always takes precedence.

XDEFAULTEMAIL

Gets replaced by the default Upload email address. If there is none, the variable string will remain untouched.

XLARGEPREVIEW, XSMALLPREVIEW

Pulls the large or small WEB preview from the Xinet database (or the filesystem) for $FILENAME and includes it in the email. If the email is HTML-formatted, it’s included and named so that it’s part of the HTML. You can either put the variable in like this:

<IMG src=$XLARGEPREVIEW blah=foo>

or just put $XLARGEPREVIEW in randomly (not after a src=) and the email Action will create an <IMG> object for it. Note that if either Web preview is not available, the email Action will wait up to five minutes for it to appear before giving up and sending a proxy image. This behavior makes it possible to trigger this Action from a File Create event.

If you're doing something fancy in JavaScript and need to “fake out” this IMG-creation convention, you could write something like this:

var my_fancy_image_src="$XLARGEPREVIEW"

and that would be replaced by the same string that would be used for the src= parameter inside an IMG object. There can be no space characters around the = sign.

Optionally, the XLARGEPREVIEW tag (and only that tag) may be written this way:

${XLARGEPREVIEW=pXXX,bRRGGBB}

and the large preview will be scaled (and/or padded) to a XXX-by-XXX-pixel image, using the Hex-encoded RGB values for the padding and/or transparent pixels. The ,bRRGGBB part may be omitted to get a default white background.

{XEMBEDPATH=/path/to/image}

Just like the X*PREVIEWs, above, except the local server path to the image is included as part of the replaceable tag. If the path doesn't resolve to a real file, a generic proxy is sent instead. Supported image formats are GIF, JPEG and PNG.

Only XEMBEDPATH and the parameterized XLARGEPREVIEW tags are required to be written with curly braces so their parameters are unambiguously attached to the tag name.

XATTACHFILE

Only works with non-HTML-formatted e-mail bodies and causes the file associated with the Action (the path in $FILENAME) to get attached to the e-mail.

Email examples

The following are examples of email messages that use these fields. They are placed in the Body field of the Action Setting.

Example 1:

The file "${XFILESHORT}" has had "${XKEY}" changed or updated by ${USERNAME}. The value of ${KEYWORD65_NAME} for "${XFILESHORT}" is ${KEYWORD65_VALUE}. You can see this file for yourself at:

http://server.domain.com/webnative/imageinfo?${URLPATHNAME}.

Sincerely,
Your server

Example 2 (when triggered by an aggregated upload, file names are provided for each file uploaded):

Dear $USERNAME,

Thank you for uploading the following assets to our server.

$FOREACHFILE

FILENAME: $XFILESHORT

Jobname: $KEYWORD123_VALUE

$XSMALLPREVIEW

$ ENDFOREACH

Best regards,

Your Xinet Server