Tags: D365FO, Emailing, Free Edition, Quote, Viewer 
Would you like to see how your quotes or purchase orders look like before emailing them to your customers and vendors? Definitely! Docentric AX now has the option to preview any report before emailing. And not just that - you can preview your reports even before printing or saving them to SharePoint, File system or Print archive. The Preview before print feature will work with any Docentric print destination. The best part is that you can use this feature completely for free, since it is included in our Free Edition.
In this article we will explain how to preview a sales quotation before emailing it to a prospect or customer in D365FO.
Create a new sales quotation
For our test purposes we are going to create a new sales quotation, following the steps described in Microsoft’s documentation.
Once the sales quotation is created, we will email it to the customer. However, we want to preview the quotation before it actually gets emailed, so we can cancel the sending of the email if we are not satisfied how the generated quote looks like. To achieve this, we will use Docentric Email print destination.
Set up Print management settings
Let’s open Docentric report setup and select SalesQuotation.Report as shown in the image below. Then click the Print management button in the PRINT DESTINATIONS button group to open Print management setup.
In Print management setup select Printer setup for the Sales quotation report:
On the Print destination settings form first make sure that Docentric print destinations are active. If they are not, click the Show Docentric destinations link in the bottom of the form.
On the Docentric print destination settings select the Email print destination and turn on the Preview before print checkbox. This will allow us to preview the report before it will be sent to the chosen print destination.
Now we will complete the rest of the settings, as needed for out test purposes:
| Tab name | Field name | Value | Explanation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Select template | Template ID | @DOCENTRIC_DEFAULT_TEMPLATE@ | Docentric will resolve the template based on the settings in Docentric report setup. |
| To, Subject | To | test@docentric.com | Manually enter the email of the recipient or choose a customer specific contact from the drop down menu (by purpose, by primary contact or by title). |
| To, Subject | Subject | Sales Quotation No. @QuotationId@, valid until @ExpiryDate@ | You can look up possible placeholders by clicking the Placeholders button on the bottom left part of the form. This will open the Placeholders form where you can copy placeholder names and paste them anywhere in the Subject field. |
| Attachment | Attachment name | SalesQuotation_@QuotationId@.pdf | Here comes the name of the sales quotation report when it will be generated and attached. You can include placeholders in the file name too. |
| Attachment | Output file format | Select one of the supported formats. | |
| Cc, Bcc, From | Cc, Bcc | Carbon copy or Blind carbon copy recipient. The same logic applies as with the To field. We will leave it empty. | |
| Cc, Bcc, From | From | sales@docentric.com | Email address of the sender. If you have several email providers defined in your global settings, this will determine which one of them will be used based on the email address match. |
| Body | Body |
Dear customer, Please find our Sales Quotation No. @QuotationId@ attached. Best regards, Docentric Sales |
You can use all formatting options available. You can also insert placeholders, available in the Field drop down menu. |
| Additional attachment rules | By clicking the Modify button you can set up additional attachments to attach with the report, e.g. Terms and Conditions. | ||
When you are done, close the Print destination settings form by clicking the OK button, and then press the Esc key to close the Print management setup form and return back to Docentric report setup.
Run the report
With our quotation created and print destination settings entered, we are ready to run the report and check if it will be previewed before emailing.
Let’s open the Sales and marketing > Sales quotations > All quotations form. Next, let’s select our newly created quotation and click the Send quotation button in the GENERATE button group on the QUOTATION menu tab.
This will open the Send quotation dialog where we need to turn on the Print quotation and the Use print management destination checkboxes and then click OK.
The sending process starts and the generated quotation gets open in Docentric Viewer. Notice the options on the top of the viewer, where we can continue, cancel or download the email. These buttons indicate that our Preview before print setting works as expected.
Choosing Cancel printing will return us back to the All quotations form. Choosing Download email will download the email with attachment(s) as an EML file, which we can open in Outlook. Choosing Continue printing to Email will however continue the process and send our quotation to the customer.
The image below shows messages after successful sending and printing process.
