Creating personalized emails is becoming one of the most common things when using notifications from with the Dataverse. Tools such as Click Dimensions allow us to extend the functionality of the Dataverse to allow further customization into these notifications.
In certain scenarios, we want to be able to send a templated email that contains Contact or Account information. Using Click Dimensions, this is an easy mapping using the freemarker setup, however, the assumption using Click Dimensions (CD) is that the Contact/Account information is pulled from the Recipient of the email.
In the case above, this works great if the information in the templated email is in fact specific to that recipient, however, there are a few cases where we may want to send Contact or Account information that is different than the Recipient. Unfortunately, even using Connections with the Email Send record, CD isn't able to distinguish the difference between the Recipient and these custom relationships, which is where we introduce what I like to call Notification Information.
Since CD supports linking custom entities to the Email Send via Connections. Using this as a guide, we can create a custom entity specifically for the scenario above that will allow us to include certain Contact/Account information into the email itself. This custom entity will include any fields we would like to display in the template, for example, Address, Contact Name, etc.
The image below shows a sample record with some fields populated:
One of the major benefits of using this structure is this record can be generated from wherever (workflow, plugin, portal, etc.) and used in these notifications.
Once the record is generated, we can then build a connection to it and associate to the Email Send, then in the freemarker code we are able to pull in the field values of this record to display Account/Contact information.
To summarize, using a custom entity to track specific field(s) you may need to present in a Click Dimensions templated email is beneficial because it allows you to control exactly what is displayed without worrying about relationships or the inability to show alternative Contact/Account information. We are able to send the email to a specific recipient that is a Contact or Account but include information regarding a completely different Contact or Account (or both). We could use the same custom entity for a variety of notifications and keep adding on fields that are needed (or create an entirely separate custom entity if the notifications are drastically different in content).
I look forward to seeing what else we can use this approach for - some say it's GENIUS, but I think it's only the beginning of more genius things to come!
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