Scheduled reports: fine-tune the way we attach reports

[Guido1982]

In the past I've built some reports that send some hardcoded HTML table reports as e-mail content, including links. I've been asked to replicate that quite often since people just open the e-mail, click on the link of the record they want to go to and do the stuff they need to. Do we have some way of customizing the way we attach or fill reports to e-mails yet? Or shall I open PR for that?

[joebordes]

I understand that you want to be able to define the contents of the email that is sent with scheduled reports instead of the stock hardcoded email. If so, now that we have the message template module we could easily move the hardcoded email to a template.

In other words, could you construct the email you want using the message template module?

Am I correct in my understanding?

[Guido1982]

Well yes that seems like what I want to do. Construct the body of the e-mail without sending an attachment. We can do that with the new message functionality? Cool, how would we go about that?

[joebordes]

It would be a bit of work to:
- find the hardcoded email
- move it to a template (something like this)
- add some special merge variables for the links and attachments (like $context in the link above)

but it shouldn't be that complicated.



also note that if format is URL it does not send the attachments (I think)

[Guido1982]

OK, looking at this now I don't think using the message template is what I want to do. The problem is that I basically want to send the report table as the e-mail body, using links inside the table. I think the MsgTemplate is very cool, but not suitable for that.