Email templates containing record fields

Please have a look at https://www.tapforms.com/forums/topic/creating-emails-from-tapforms/ to send emails with content captured from your record.

The challenge with porting some of that stuff over to iOS is whilst it makes sense for iPad it isn’t as useful on iPhone. That means it’s something useful for only half of the iOS market now that iOS apps are on both form factors. Perhaps an extra unlock for that as a feature so that those who only use an iPhone don’t have to pay for a feature they can’t use. That then leads to complications in the UI around enabling and disabling functionality based on the purchases which has their own challenges (and the inevitable restore purchases button). There’s also the other challenge that there is only one Brendan.

I think you can use a calculation field to create the text you want and if you’re not doing a whole bunch of them at once, you can use the process Daniel Leu suggested as well. If you look at the bottom of the Calculations documentation, there is an example of formatting an address using a calculation field. You could use that as the basis of building out a fully formatted body. Alternatively you could use a script to build the template as well for creating the email link. Using a script, you’d put your template inside of the script and you can use variables inside of it.

You can use a script to set multiple field values, setFieldValue or setFieldValues from the JS API can help you out there. Once you set a value, you also need to save those changes with document.saveAllChanges() otherwise they might not persist.

On my iPad I did a quick test to build a form with a standard address layout and then made a script field to populate a “Web Site” field for me. The script looks like this:

var name = record.getFieldValue('fld-f3d753238cf4457cb2ccd5c0eaa96b0f');
var email = record.getFieldValue('fld-b1b7229002144634ae174c861b78ae72');
var address_1 = record.getFieldValue('fld-ba8218dbc15741428af68f3e80c29fea');
var address_2 = record.getFieldValue('fld-d11947b80b7a4592aa1815588275ef8e');
var city = record.getFieldValue('fld-c22af0fe9d1a4fd3a587d96a83b352e5');
var postcode = record.getFieldValue('fld-10d06c4cd8564b5a87ed365c5a307740');
var state = record.getFieldValue('fld-35f71f806348488e8f755be48b8ce2f2');
var country = record.getFieldValue('fld-0b6fe598592c428bab1010755d4bfa89');
var text = record.getFieldValue('fld-8b5d1c927eca4daa89c7750848bd02c2');

var addressLines = [];
name ? addressLines.push(name) : null;
address_1 ? addressLines.push(address_1) : null;
address_2 ? addressLines.push(address_2) : null;
addressLines.push(`${city} ${state} ${postcode}`);
country ? addressLines.push(country) : null;
var address = addressLines.join('\n');

var subject = encodeURIComponent(`Hello ${name}! We missed you!`);
var body = encodeURIComponent(`Hello ${name},

We haven't seen you for a while and we wanted to 
reach out to you. We don't  have a phone number 
on file for you but we do have your address:
${address}

If this isn't correct, please let us know so we 
can keep in touch. 

Thanks in advance!

Your Friends`);

var linkText = `mailto:${email}?subject=${subject}&body=${body}`;
var send_email_template_id = 'fld-f03ed31415304eab814d9f137db2f598';
record.setFieldValue(send_email_template_id, linkText);
document.saveAllChanges();

• The first chunk of the script gets all of the fields I care about via getFieldValue, that’s relatively straight forward.
• The next section does a simple address composition as an example of how empty/unset fields could be handled (it’s not perfect, I took a shortcut on the City/State/Postcode line). It uses the Javascript ternary operators to determine if it should add to an array and then does a join on what was added to the array.
• The next piece uses the Javascript backtick string interpolation feature to template the values out. It’s similar to the bracket format above except it uses a dollar sign and curly braces to wrap the variable. These values map to variables defined within the script itself. The first line is easy, it’s just the subject line. The second one shows how you can turn that into a multiline string to splice in values. Of note here I use encodeURIComponent to escape the text so that if you put in a special character it doesn’t munge the email.
• The last few lines compose the link text that makes the email. This is essentially the process Daniel Leu suggested though not encapsulated as well as he has done.

As you change the referenced fields, the web site field will update with the new values and then you can just tap on the globe icon and Tap Forms (after it asks “are you sure?”) will spin up Mail on the iPad prefilled with your email.

Edit: Forgot that the backticks are special on Brendan’s forum too. I used an online HTML entity encoder/decoder to fix it up.

Edit: I wrapped some of the lines in the message to better fit in the forum. Where you put line breaks in the script is where they will show up in the email. I’d generally want to manually wrap lines when doing plain text emails at less than 70 columns but that’s just me.

I really should learn Javascript… Thank you, Sam, for showing and explaining how to make the code more elegant and robust!