How to send one email about multiple cases

Hi,

Hopefully I’m missing something obvious here!

For our street naming and numbering processes we need to send a weekly list of all completed processes to another team via an email (preferably as an attached PDF).

I can’t see a way to send one email for all processes automatically. I’ve built the message, pdf template, page include list, a signal and the subsets - I just can’t see a way to send one email containing the information on all (eventually it will be four) separate process types on a schedule (once a week).

Any advice would be appreciated (unless it’s get them in a modern system and export the information over, we’re working on that).

Thanks

Hi Victoria

We do this by having a single special record on an Object called e.g. “Calculator” (its also used to aggregate sums and counts of various objects). That Object has a 1 to Many relation to all the other relevant Objects (e.g. Many Street Naming records to 1 Calculator record), and every time we need to relate to that Calculator special record we do so using the “Add relation to special record” rule (normally every time a record is created on the relevant objects or could be e.g. when a record’s process is completed). You could add the relation to other objects and do the same.

The email we send is based on Calculator, sent by a rule triggered by a scheduled Signal. You could apply a subset to that rule to limit it to only triggering on that special record if you end up having additional records in the Calculator object, but theres only ever a need to have one record.

The email based on Calculator then contains a Record list that uses a composite (or a Template) based on Street Naming (and any other record lists/templates pointing to other objects you want to display), with the record list/template constrained by e.g. only records submitted in the last week.

You can do the same to create a single PDF file (base object Calculator that looks at the many related Street Naming records) that you could attach to the email (e.g. save the generated PDF to a File property of the Calculator record), and also aggregate the sum or count with a composite based on that same object.

If you wanted to display multiple objects in a combined list (e.g. mix Object 1 records with Object 2 records instead of showing them in separate lists) you could use a join object and relate that to the Calculator object instead.

Hope that makes sense!
James

Hi,

Thanks for your reply - took me a while to sort (first time messing with special records)but it looks like this is working a treat!

Hi Victoria,

Glad that James was able to describe a solution for you!

I think to make this feel natural and efficient to build, we will consider allowing messages to have no “Base Object” set - ie the message being sent is not about an individual record. So I will add this to our wishlist.

For anyone else passing this thread and wondering how to solve the same problem, an alternative might be:

  1. Create another object called “Weekly mail” (or similar)
  2. Schedule a signal to create one of these records once per week
  3. On creation, rule associates it with all the relevant records that need to be emailed about
  4. On creation, also send the message

In this setup you’d build your Message (and your PDF) with a Base Object of “Weekly mail”. These would list their related records.

A bonus of this approach is it gives you neat audit trail of what was sent, when.

Paul