Creating an Alternative Email Template

You can create your own email template which can contain organization-specific information, with your own logos and corporate style.

After deployment it can be used as the default email template for any Push Destination using the Openspace Email channel type.

The files you can use to create your email template are as follows:

  • HTML file (Mandatory) This contains the information about what you want the email to contain. It typically includes:
    • a reference to the .css file as its stylesheet. This can be included using an html line similar to the following:
      <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="cid:Easycss" />
    • references to any of the graphics files contained in the cid.properties file (referred to by their cid: identifier, prefaced by ’cid:’) , for example:
      <img src="cid:cidOne"/>

      refers to NewProductLogo.png in the example in cid.properties above. Referring to them in this way means they can by shown externally as part of the email when the html file is used to create an email after deployment.

    • the content you want to include in the email.

      This html can contain any of the following tokens, each of which will be replaced by an actual value at runtime;

         
      %%token.workItemUrl%% URL of the work item.
      %%token.workItemId%% The id of the work item.
      %%token.entityName%% The entity name who requires push notifications as defined in the Organizational Model.
      %%token.mailDate%% The date and time the pushed mail message was sent.
      %%token.mailFrom%% The name of the sender of the pushed mail message.
      %%token.mailSubject%% The subject line for the pushed mail message.
      %%token.mailTo%% The user/s who the pushed mail message is sent to.
      %%token.mailCc%% The user/s who the pushed mail message is copied to.
      %%token.mailBcc%% The user/s who the pushed mail message is blind-copied to.
      %%token.hostIPAddress%% The IP address of the host.
      %%token.hostMachineName%% The host machine name.
      %%token.baseurl%% The base URL.
  • CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) file This is a stylesheet file, typically for your organization, which contains standard information such as banners or background colors, that you want to be in every email you send.
  • graphics you are referencing from the cid.properties file, which would then be used by the html file. These must be available locally, and can either be in the same directory (Presentation Resources), or in a sub-directory.
    Note:
    • cid.properties This allows you to reference any graphics files you have available locally (in the same directory, or a subdirectory) which you want to be used when you push the work item (which then sends an email to notify the user of the work item). It is specifically used for embedded images / css in emails, rather than providing the option of external calls.
    • Each filename will have a cid:<name identifier which allows it to be accessed remotely as well as locally. For example, the cid.properties file might contain lines such as the following, where cidOne is the cid: identifier for NewProductLogo.png when you reference it later in the HTML file:
      cidOne:NewProductLogo.png