Custom notifications in Sitecore Content Hub

21 Jun 2022
Szymon Kuzniak

Sitecore Content Hub has a rich set of notifications complemented by a set of editable email templates. They can be easily turned on and off depending on the channel - either email or internal push message. However administrators are restricted only to this initial list and its base functionality. Sometimes it might be necessary to notify users about events which are not available out of the box or use non-standard email template.

As with many Content Hub customizations, notifications can be extended using scripts and dedicated API. Adding new notification type, for example to send email to only a group of users interested in particular group of products was pretty simple - trigger a script action when the product is updated and match the relation with user group to find out to whom send the message.

This post is part of the series:

Create email template <= you are here
Custom settings
Trigger and complete script

Once I had the idea of how I can approach this task, I wanted to create an email template. And this turned out to be not so easy as I initially assumed because… there is no such option. Directly in CH it is possible to edit existing templates but not to create them. Quick google search revealed an article on how this can be done and to my surprise it turned out that others are using API to create new email template. Unfortunately the way shown in the blog post didn’t work for me but using it as a cornerstone I was able to create the template I wanted.

Below is the snippet that does exactly that.

// These are the names of the email template properties which can only be set from the code
var fieldTemplateName = "M.Mailing.TemplateName";
var fieldTemplateLabel = "M.Mailing.TemplateLabel";
var fieldTemplateVariables = "M.Mailing.TemplateVariables";

// This is the name of the template and a user friendly label
var templateName = "CustomNotificationEmail";
var templateLabel = "Custom Notification Email";

// Label template value is dependant on the culture, so all available cultures will be required
var cultures = await MClient.Cultures.GetAllCulturesCachedAsync();

// Creation of the template
var mailTemplate = await MClient.EntityFactory.CreateAsync(Stylelabs.M.Sdk.Constants.MailTemplate.DefinitionName);

// Loading properties which will be used
await mailTemplate.LoadPropertiesAsync(new PropertyLoadOption(fieldTemplateName));
await mailTemplate.LoadPropertiesAsync(new PropertyLoadOption(fieldTemplateLabel));
await mailTemplate.LoadPropertiesAsync(new PropertyLoadOption(fieldTemplateVariables));

// Setting name of the template - it will be used to send emails
mailTemplate.SetPropertyValue(fieldTemplateName, templateName);

// Setting user friendly label in every culture
foreach (var culture in cultures)
{
    mailTemplate.SetPropertyValue(fieldTemplateLabel, culture, templateLabel);
}

// Template variables can only be passed as JArray object
var templateVariables = @"[
    { 
        'Name': 'Variable_1',
        'VariableType': 'String',
        'Templated': 'true',
        'Template': '{variable1}'
    },
    { 
        'Name': 'Variable_1',
        'VariableType': 'String',
        'Templated': 'true',
        'Template': '{variable2}'
    },
]";
var templateVariablesObject = JArray.Parse(templateVariables);
mailTemplate.SetPropertyValue(fieldTemplateVariables, templateVariablesObject);

// Save the template
await MClient.Entities.SaveAsync(mailTemplate);

The code above will create a simple template and fill in all the properties which are not accessible from the UI.

Existing template can be retrieved using the notification API

IMailTemplateEntity template = await MClient.Notifications.GetMailTemplateEntityAsync("TemplateName", 
            new EntityLoadConfiguration(CultureLoadOption.All, PropertyLoadOption.None, RelationLoadOption.None));

Once the template is awailable, its other properties, such as description, email subject or the body of the message can be edited directly from the Content Hub UI.

In the second post I will show how to make use of the template and match the relation to user groups using settings.

Stay tuned.