Email Notification Enhancements

[mdebower]

Currently in Windchill 10.1 m040, the ability to easily customize the OOTB email notifications is severely limited and the canned notices do not meet the needs of our business.  For example,  when creating a promotion request, the description cannot be added to the canned email notification that is sent out.

This request is to add the necessary functionality to the OOTB email notifications so that various elements (descriptions, routing comments, etc...) can be added to the notice quickly and easily without the need for programming changes.

[STEVEG]

Oh god yes.  A thousand times yes.  We have our partner company getting that updated for us.

[TomU]

Reference: https://support.ptc.com/appserver/cs/view/solution.jsp?n=CS151717

[STEVEG]

That's the problem.  It shouldn't be that we have to add java programming in order to get this information in the email notifications.  What's in the emails OOTB is too generic and provides no useful information except the name of the change object.

Emails would be more useful if it had the description of the task.  That way they can tell whether they need to attend to the task immediately or not.

You might say that all the user has to do is click the link to go into PDMLink.  And that is true.  But it's also about priority.  If a user gets several email notices overnight then when they get in to work they know which ones they need to get to first without having to open each one THEN decide which to start with.

[mdebower]

Some requests that I have gotten from users:

1. company logo / header
2. description of the task / promo request
3. summary of the routing comments
4. link to the PBO, not to the task or request, but to the object of the task/request.
5. Voting summary.
6. different looks from one type of notification to another.
7. different font / color

[BjoernRueegg]

Perhaps it would be possible to create a configurator like for the native task templates. So you would be able to create Mail Templates where you can choose which table, attributes etc. are being included and this template is linked to the workflow mail robot.

For sure it has to be extendable for some own customizations.

[mdebower]

Also subscription notification emails.

Also ability to include check in comments.

[tstacy]

Not sure about Windchill 10.1, but in Windchill 10.2, we modified the html templates used to build the email notifications. In our case we were modifying the emails coming out of the discussion forum, but there are html templates for most of the notifications. They are TemplateProcessor based, but accessible under codebase/templates.  You might take a look there, but an easier way to customize any email notifications from Windchill would be a big plus.

[doehr]

You have to be a bit careful about this. What one company finds as useful in the emails others may not; PTC may not be able to have a dedicated set of pre-given values. Just in case you weren't aware of it there is the option of using local Variables defined on a task and use the following code to grab an attribute value (like the Description) from an object and get that value into the email:

com.ptc.core.lwc.server.LWCNormalizedObject obj = new

com.ptc.core.lwc.server.LWCNormalizedObject(primaryBusinessObject,null,null, null);

obj.load("xxxxxx");

Object softAttribValue = obj.get("xxxxxx");

if (softAttribValue instanceof String) {

yyyyyy = (String) softAttribValue;

}

In the above example, xxxxxx is the internal name of the attribute on the object in question, yyyyyy is the local variable you declared in the Variables tab of the task, and to get that value into the email you would use {yyyyyy} in the Activity tab of the task.

Does that help?

[BineshKumar1]

I agree, but there should be configure what goes in to email.- say attributes, roles,promotion objects, affected objects and so on. In our case, we wanted promotion targets to be in approve promotion request email. We followed the approach you just mentioned, created a string variable, passed an html table with promotion objects. Used the variable in the activity.

Two things with the code 1. LWCNormalizedObject obj API is deprecated in 10.2 and is replaced with presistableadapter. 2. We have to catch null pointer exception because if the description is empty then this method will return null pointer exception and that will stall the workflow

Regards

Binesh Kumar

[STEVEG]

We are getting to the end of our modifications for email notifications of CR's/CN's.  Very disappointing that we wasted all this time trying to get actual helpful information in emails which might break.

[mdebower]

Steve,

Any numbers you could share?   How long?   Man-hours?   Maybe some hard data would help the cause.

I peel your fain.

-marc

[STEVEG]

We've been working on and off for at least a year.  But just to make it clear by no means does that indicate we worked on it anywhere near what that might sound like.  Due to holidays, vacations, other projects...

And there were probably two different times where the project was put to the side for a month or two.

So it would be really difficult to estimate the actual amount of time spent.  Don't get me wrong.  We have spent a fair amount of time.  But the actual amount of time we spent doesn't correlate to saying "at least a year".  If that makes sense.

We have a consulting company doing the actual work.  After they make the changes I would do the testing.  Then report back what needs to change.

There was just a bit more to change and now that the API is changing I don't see the point of finishing it off and wasting anymore time until after we update to 11.  If we are even allowed to continue with the modification.  But that won't be until minimum next summer and probably later.

[jbailey]

Definitely a huge deal to us.  Users need to have more than "approve promotion request" to tell them what to do in an email, especially when that promotion approver may be working on multiple projects

[gprajeesh77]

There should be a way to specify the base url different from wt.server.codebase in email content / body when the mail is sent to external users

[nsamardzija]

Thank you for the idea, the comments and votes. Your idea is interesting and we can see the benefit for your use case. However, it is not part of the strategic roadmap at this time and we don’t have plans to address it.

[TomU]

@nsamardzija,

1. Are there any amount of customer votes that will cause an idea to be added to the roadmap even if PTC management doesn't want it?
2. Companies need a way to modify the existing out-of-the-box email notifications to meet their needs.  The current approach requires modifying the codebase, and this will no longer be allowed with Windchill+.  If PTC management is not interested in this idea, and modifying the codebase is going away, what will be the supported method to make these changes going forward?

[nsamardzija]

@TomU thanks for your reply. Your questions raised discussion internally and we've decided to change the idea back to a status that is more representative of where PTC Management considers this idea. This idea is roadmap aligned.