[Tip of the Week] Adding Line Breaks in Emails

[gio]

hello all,

sending emails from Tulip is really useful to notify people in your team about things that are happening on the frontline of your operations. in Tulip, you can send emails with Variables, Table Records, Machine Data and static text. furthermore, you can format these emails with line breaks to improve legibility for the recipient. here’s how to do this!!

1. add an Action > Send Email > Expression and include '\n' where you’d like the line break
   
   
2. save the Expression and you will see the formatting will be applied
   
   
3. at this point, you will have to remove the \ from the Expression and re-Save the Expression
   
   
4. as you can see, the email will come through with the line breaks:
   
   

hope this helps, let us know if anyone has any questions!!

[michael_qian]

Hi Gio, thanks for sharing this! This info was extremely helpful as I am very new to this. I have a couple follow up questions.

How did you assign the timestamp/date to the title of the email (Tulip Alert for 04Oct21 17:38)? My title would be the start of my message or expression until it is cut off and I can’t figure out how to fix that.

Also, do you know a good way for users to send a personalized message through Tulip to an admin (or assigned user) via email? In my case, I’m trying to create a “Help” button for users to go to when they get stuck.

Thanks so much for your help!

[Pete_Hartnett]

Hey Michael!

Welcome to community! Love to see new people joining the conversation.

There isn’t currently a way to change the headers of the emails. the “Tulp Alert for 04Oct21 17:38” is automatically generated based on when the trigger fires. In the past we have had similar requests to enable some more flexibility in email formatting.

I can make a feature request to get this worked on. Is there other information about the email would you like to be able to edit?

A number of our customers user SendGrid to send emails through tulip with almost infinite flexibility. Gio wrote a thread on how to do this here. Its a little more involved but enables incredibly flexible email templates.

As far as making a help button

1. Add a help button to your step
   
   
2. In the trigger of that button, add a transition trigger to go to a notification step
   
   
3. In your notification, you can add an email body field if you want the user to be able to enter the email body.
   
   
4. Add a button to send emails
   
   
5. On the send Email trigger, select your admin and your email body input
   
   

Does this do what you need? Is there some functionality that this solution is missing?

Really glad to have you part of the community!
Pete

[michael_qian]

Hi Pete,

Thank you for the warm welcome and for the helpful info! Glad to be here and overall this tool has been a very enjoyable learning experience. No worries on the headers, I can work around that for now. The info you and Gio provided on the flexible email template is what I was more interested in figuring out so thank you for this.

For now, I’ll give your method a try first and just to be sure I did this correctly -

• The email body was created from inputs > text?

• In the trigger options for sending the email…I can’t seem to figure out how to add the additional “User” imput before the message: Variable > msg_body. Can you walk me through how to add that?

Thanks for your help!
Best,
Michael

[Pete_Hartnett]

Hey Michael.

• That is right, the email body field is from the input > text dropdown. With your new text box selected. Assign that input to a variable. In this case I created a msg_body variable (if you start typing msg_body you can then select “create mes_body” to create a new variable)
  

  

• I also turned on multiple lines so it displays a larger text box
  

  

• Can you shoot me a screenshot of what your trigger looks like? that second user field should have the options “User” and “Manager”. Manager would email the assigned manager of that user, where as user would email the person you selected. Working with out support team to understand why this might not be showing up.
  

  

Pete

[michael_qian]

Hi Pete,

Great! I was wondering about the multiple lines but forgot to ask, thanks for showing that.

Here’s the screenshot of the trigger (hopefully the image appears here)

Thanks!
Michael

[Pete_Hartnett]

Hey Michael.

The way you have it setup should be good to go to rock and roll. Working with out support team to try to understand why you don’t see that second user setting.

I’ll update this thread when I have a definitive answer, but that should work as it is

Dont be afraid to post on community when you run into any other painpoints! I’m here to help!
Pete

[michael_qian]

Sounds great. Thanks Pete.