Email expression for message body getting erased

Support, Troubleshooting, & Help
1

I am using the Microsoft Outlook connector and I’m having an issue with creating the message body’s content. It appears that if the expression (to create the actual message body) references a variable that is blank or not populated, the entire message body gets removed.

Here is some info on how the processing is setup:… I have a basic form with a submit button. The button has a trigger that saves info the Tulip table. Then, it calls the email connector, which, creates the email and sends it. The email is sent successfully. So, there’s no issue with the actual connector. Also, the HTML formatting in the message seems to work and display the text as I need it to.

Expression code for creating the message body:
'Email Confirmation. <br /><br /> <b>Project ID:</b>' + @Table Record.Current Record.ID + '<br />' + '<b>Project Name:</b> ' + @Table Record.Current Record.Project + '<br />' + '<b>Active: </b>' + @Table Record.Current Record.Active + '<br />' + '<b>Dept: </b>' + @Table Record.Current Record.Dept + '

So, if I don’t “require” a Dept. on the form that’s being submitted…and the user doesn’t enter a department, then the entire email body is blank. However, if they enter a department, then the email body is complete and sends it as notated in the ‘expression’ builder.

Do I need to set these values to “ “ when the step loads, then overwrite it with whatever the user chooses? Or, is this some bug? …Or is my expression wrong?

2

There is (at least) two options to solve this:

  • Initialize all variables with an empty string. The concatenation will work with empty strings but not with null values (this is another data type).

  • use link(@Table Record.Current Record.Dept , ‘‘) which will add an empty string, if the value for department is null. You could also choose ‘ - ‘ or so, to add any kind of information, when the department is null.

On Table Records I prefer the second solution.

Hope that helps :wink: