Let’s say that we want to email invoices to our customers from Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations with some useful information in the email body such as billing period and due date. Moreover, we want to have this information nicely designed, using the styles of our company. Of course, we also want to have the company logo and perhaps some other images from the database in such emails.
The built-in functionality in Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations supports emailing invoices but only with the empty email body. Luckily, you can use Docentric AX Free Edition to set up emails which are going to be sent from D365FO to contain various dynamic information such as customer contact person, billing data, dates, amounts, etc.
When you open the Print destination settings form and choose Docentric Email print destination, you will notice the rich HTML editor that you can use to design your emails in terms of styles and formatting. There is also a dropdown list: Fields that contain all available placeholders you can use in the email body as well as in all other print destination settings such as the email subject, attachment name, blob path, output filename, etc. Using placeholders you will make your emails dynamic.
There are many placeholders supported out-of-the-box for all reports such as @REPORTCAPTION@, @COMPANYNAME@, @COMPANYLOGO@, @WORKERNAME@, @WORKERIMAGE@, etc. These are called standard placeholders. Moreover, each report can have additional custom placeholders, e.g. @InvoiceId@, @SalesId@, @InvoiceAccount@ or @CustContactName@ for the Customer invoice report.
Besides this classification, placeholders differ by the type of the content they get replaced with. Docentric supports two kind: text and image placeholders. Text placeholders are replaced with text (e.g. Invoice ID), while image placeholders are replaced with images (e.g. Company logo).
As we said before, you can add any placeholder to the email body by selecting it from the Fields drop down list. Custom placeholders usually have a prefix, e.g. INV for Customer invoice. Text placeholders are inserted as @Placeholder@, while image placeholders are inserted as blank pictures.
Let’s insert a company logo which is a standard image placeholders, or in other words, which is supported for all reports.
In Source view you can see the HTML tag and its attributes. Height and width define the image size in sending emails' bodies. If not specified, the image will be displayed in its real size.
Now let’s print the invoice using Use print management to send the email with the attached invoice to the corresponding customer.
This is how the sent email looks like.
With Docentric’s powerful email editor you can use not only company logo when emailing reports but you can easily achieve a very professional look of your emails. Below is a real-world example of an emailed invoice and how to design it.
If you want to use custom images from the database (besides company logo) in the email body when emailing reports, you can introduce custom image placeholders. See an example >>
Watch Video on How To Configure and Use Report Email Templates >>