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Default Template Building Blocks

Outbound E-mail ships with a number of predefined default Template Building Blocks which have been designed to perform basic templating tasks for Outbound E-mail.

This section lists the default Template Building Blocks that ship with Outbound E-mail. The default Template Building Blocks are:

  • Outbound E-mail Pre-processing
  • GeneratePlainTextEmail
  • Outbound E-mail Post-processing
  • Set Output Item By Email Mode

Outbound E-mail Pre-processing

Creates package items that are used by the other Template Building Blocks in the Page Template. You can specify the following optional parameter for the PreProcessing Template Building Block to add custom data to URLs for subscription management:

  • Unsubscribe Query String—define a query string to add to the Unsubscribe URL
  • Change Profile Query String—define a query string to add to the Change Profile URL
  • Confirm URL Query String—define a query string to add to the Confirm Subscription URL

The query string is composed of a series of field=value pairs separated by an ampersand, for example field1=value1&field2=value2&field3=value3

For more information about subscription links, see Adding Subscription Links.

GeneratePlainTextEmail

Produces a basic plain-text version of your HTML e-mail message. The GeneratePlainTextEmail Template Building Block takes the XHTML output package item and, using XSLT, strips the XHTML elements to create a rudimentary plain text e-mail which it then inserts into the package as another output element. The Template Building Block requires valid XHTML as input.

You can specify the following parameter for the GeneratePlainTextEmail Template Building Block:

  • Maximum Line Width—specify a fixed line length

The GeneratePlainTextEmail Template Building Block is primarily intended for testing. For actual e-mails, it is recommended to create a separate Dreamweaver Template to handle the formatting of plain text e-mails as XHTML e-mails typically contain elements such as links which do not make sense to include in a plain text e-mail. For more information, see Separating HTML format and plain-text format

Outbound E-mail Post-processing

Marks up the Component Presentations for each Target Group for the mailer service to resolve and merges the HTML e-mail with the plain text version (if existing). You can specify the following parameters for the Outbound E-mail Post-processing Template Building Block:

  • Track Links:
    • Select Yes if you want to track whether the recipient clicks links in an e-mail
    • Select No if you do not want to track whether the recipient clicks links in an e-mail, or if you want to create each trackable link separately using the GetLinkTrackingURL method in a Dreamweaver Template (see Creating Dreamweaver Templates for Outbound E-mail)
  • Attachments Metadata Field—specify a Metadata field in the Page which contains a binary file to attach to your e-mail message. The binary file must be a Multimedia Component. For more information, see Adding binary content)

Set Output Item By Email Mode

Adds an HTML or Text version of the Component Presentation to the Output depending on whether the Dreamweaver SetEmailType() is set to html or text.