Send an Email using IFS Workflow

There were several comments on my last post on How to Include additional attachments in e-mail reports in IFS Cloud whether it’s possible to send an email using a workflow. I have done testing and seems it’s possible! This post explains the steps I took to make it work.

1. Entity and Projection Configuration
2. Creating the Workflow and Event
3. Design the workflow
4. Trigger the Workflow

I couldn’t find a standard projection action which exposed the Command_SYS.mail procedure so I decided to create a custom entity and a custom projection. It’s possible to add this to any existing projection as well but since sending mail is a common function, I thought it could be good to have it separately so we could use the send mail functionality without affecting other business areas.

Entity and Projection Configuration

Create an Entity configuration with a dummy field and publish.

Go to New Projection Configuration assistant and create a projection using above entity. Under Custom actions, add Command_SYS.mail

Creating the Workflow and Event

In this example I used a pretty simple scenario where an email will be sent when Customer name is modified.

Create a new Workflow

Deploy the workflow

Create a new Custom Event based on CustomerInfo entity and CUSTOMER_INFO_TAB.

Select Fire When as Objects are changed and add NAME as the attribute to change so our event will trigger only when the Customer name is changed.

Create a new action of type Workflow

Provide the Workflow ID create in above and set the timing as Asynchronous.

Asynchronous means any error in the workflow is not affect the main transaction. It’s the most suitable option for this type of workflows where it needs to create some records in the database, in this case, an application message.

Save event action and set the event to Active

Design the workflow

Clone and create a new version of your workflow.

Go to Design and Add a task and change the type to IFS Projection.

In the IFS projection properties, select the Custom Projection and the action created above.

I was too lazy to fetch the values from event itself so used hard coded values here. But you can use values from the event as parameters.

Deploy the workflow version.

Trigger the Workflow

Go to Customer page and do a change in the customer name which triggers the workflow.

Since there was no Mail sender defined in my environment, I didn’t get the mail but got the Application Message to prove that the workflow is working fine 😎

Sending email with attachment is something needs to investigate further. Will get back more on that soon.

Please comment your thoughts and questions below!