E-Mail Templates in S/4 HANA

E-Mail communication is very common business requirements in day-to-day life. SAP understands that and comes up with very interesting feature in S/4 HANA (cloud and on premise both) – E-Mail Templates. In this article, I will provide a little overview and a demo of E-Mail templates.

What is E-Mail templates?

With S/4 HANA Output Management, SAP provides E-mail templates to be configured which will be mapped to output types in BRF+. We can maintain HTML and Plain text in different languages in these  E-Mail templates and also, can map a CDS view for handling dynamic variables. This feature would save a lot of hardcoding or other custom ways to maintain E-mail content as done in past. Although in S/4 HANA, SAP uses E-Mail templates specifically in output management, still we can use this feature independent of output configurations and we will see in Demo section below for its usage.

Prerequisites:

◈ Basic Knowledge of CDS views.
◈ Good knowledge of ABAP.
◈ Basic understanding of HTML.

How to create E-Mail Template?

There is no specific transaction to create email templates but we can create it as a repository object in SE80 transaction as follow:

1. Select the package ( or Local objects ) and right click.
2. Select “Create” -> “More” -> “Email Template”

However, we can always view/Edit the existing E-Mail templates from program SMTG_WB_START.

Different Component in E-Mail templates:

Header –

◈ We need to maintain a name / description for the email template.

◈ Also, we can maintain a CDS view which should be pre-delivered and can be used to provide dynamic variables in email content (body or subject).

Texts-

1. Languages - Maintain Email in different languages

2. CDS Fields  - Set of CDS view fields used in Email content

3. Email Subject  - Email subject description

4. Body HTML - Email body content in HTML

5. Body Plain Text - Email body content in plain text

Dynamic Variables in E-mail Content:

For maintaining dynamic variables, we would need to create a CDS view which would contain the required data. For each different email variables, we can pass CDS key with Name/Value pair to Email Template API classes and replace the variables with desired content very easily.

◈ Create a CDS view ZRSCDS_INVOICE_DATA (for demo, I took reference of billing document header and Item tables).

@AbapCatalog.sqlViewName: 'ZRSCDS_INVDATA'

@AbapCatalog.compiler.compareFilter: true

@AccessControl.authorizationCheck: #CHECK

@EndUserText.label: 'Invoice Data Line Item wise' 

//@VDM.viewType:#BASIC

define view ZRSCDS_INVOICE_DATA 

as select from vbrk as zzrs_vbrk

join vbrp as zzrs_vbrp

    on zzrs_vbrk.vbeln = zzrs_vbrp.vbeln 

{

 key zzrs_vbrk.vbeln,

 key zzrs_vbrp.posnr,      

     zzrs_vbrk.fkart, 

     zzrs_vbrk.vbtyp,

     @Semantics.currencyCode: true

     zzrs_vbrk.waerk, 

     zzrs_vbrk.vkorg, 

     zzrs_vbrk.fkdat,    

     @Semantics.amount.currencyCode: 'waerk' 

     @DefaultAggregation: #SUM

     zzrs_vbrk.netwr, 

     zzrs_vbrk.kunag as kunag,      

     zzrs_vbrp.fkimg, 

     zzrs_vbrp.vrkme, 

     zzrs_vbrp.meins, 

     zzrs_vbrp.matnr         

}

◈ Add this CDS view in Email template Header.

◈ Assign CDS view fields in E-Mail Body and Subject where ever required.

Email Preview-

We can always preview our email template how it will look once sent to customers by clicking on “preview” button as highlighted:

How to call E-Mail Templates ?

Till now, I have created E-mail templates in system. Now, I would like to integrate this in one of the calling programs which send email to customers and email content will be taken from templates. For the demo purpose, I created a simple program where I can pass receiver email address, E-Mail Template, Language and CDS Key ( Billing Document in our case ).

SAP has provided E-Mail template API class which can be instantiated and used to get email content. Steps are as follow:

◈ Create instance of class CL_SMTG_EMAIL_API.

DATA(lo_email_api) = cl_smtg_email_api=>get_instance( iv_template_id = p_em_id  ).

◈ Create instance of class CL_BCS.

DATA(lo_bcs) = cl_bcs=>create_persistent( ).

◈ Prepare CDS view Key table with Key Field name and value.

DATA(lt_cds_key) = VALUE ty_gt_data_key( ( name = 'vbeln' value = p_vbeln ) ).

◈ Integrate E-Mail subject and body with email instance

lo_email_api->render_bcs( io_bcs = lo_bcs iv_language = p_spras it_data_key = lt_cds_key ). 

◈ Set Sender, receiver and send the email.

  " Set Email Sender

  DATA(lo_sender) = cl_sapuser_bcs=>create( sy-uname ).

  lo_bcs->set_sender( i_sender = lo_sender ).

  " Set Email Receiver(s)

  DATA(lo_recipient) = cl_cam_address_bcs=>create_internet_address( p_rec ).

  lo_bcs->add_recipient( EXPORTING i_recipient = lo_recipient ).

  " Send Email

  lo_bcs->send( ).

Selection-Screen of Demo Program :

Result Email with replacement of dynamic variables :