Create HTML emails from RichText fields with embedded images and attachments

If you want to send formatted (HTML) emails from Domino you have a couple of options.

Starting with version 9, there’s a simple action that allows you to send HTML mail by just configuring some options. You can also use Tony McGuckin’s emailBean snippet to send an HTML mail from an XPage directly, including embedded images and/or attachments. And there’s also the SSJS snippet I wrote to send an email from any backend SSJS script.

Unfortunately, none of these could do what I wanted: send an HTML mail with the contents based on a RichText field (stored as MIME), including any embedded images. With the standard photo upload option available in the XPage embedded CKEditor it’s real easy to add embedded images. Tony’s emailBean snippet came close, but it requires a DominoDocument object as a parameter and thus only works when used directly on the XPage where you create the content. In my case, I either wanted to pick a set of documents to be send or use a scheduled agent to do that.

So I investigated how I could create a DominoDocument from a standard document object.

First stop: this snippet that uses the .wrap() function of the DominoDocument object to wrap a standard document. That worked, but didn’t add the RichText fields to the wrapped document. So I dived deeper and found the JavaDocs for the DominoDocument here. Turns out that there is a getRichTextItem() function that returns a DominoRichTextItem. That object, the DominoRichTextItem, is also used in the emailBean code. The JavaDocs for the DominoRichTextItem describe that you can use a MIMEEntity to create one. The newly created DominoRichTextItem can then be attached to the wrapped DominoDocument.

Here’s the XSnippet I just added to wrap a document, including MIME.

For this to work you need to enable the “Store contents as HTML and MIME” option of the RichText field that you’re storing the HTMl in. When you’ve done that you can use the emailBean to create and send the email:

function sendEmailFromRichText() {
  DominoDocument wrappedDoc = wrapDocument(docMail, "body");

  //now we can pass the wrapped document, including the MIME contents to the EmailBean
  EmailBean emailBean = new  EmailBean();

  emailBean.setSendTo("someone@somewhere.com");
  emailBean.setSubject("Here's a mail");

  emailBean.setDocument(wrappedDoc);
  emailBean.setFieldName("body");

  emailBean.setBannerHTML("<p>Hi, "  + sendTo + "</p>");
  emailBean.setFooterHTML("<p>Kind regards, "  + senderName + "</p>");

  emailBean.setSenderEmail("i@dontexist.com");
  emailBean.setSenderName("Name of the sender");

  emailBean.send();
}

/*
 * Wraps a lotus.domino.Document as a com.ibx.xsp.model.domino.wrapped.DominoDocument, including the RichText item
 * 
 * @param doc document to be wrapped
 * @param richTextItemName name of the rich text item containing the MIME contents that need to be wrapped too
 */
private static DominoDocument wrapDocument( final Document doc, final String richTextItemName ) throws NotesException {
     
  DominoDocument wrappedDoc = null;
       
  Database db = doc.getParentDatabase();
     
  //disable MIME to RichText conversion
  db.getParent().setConvertMIME(false) ;
 
  //wrap the lotus.domino.Document as a lotus.domino.DominoDocument
  //see http://public.dhe.ibm.com/software/dw/lotus/Domino-Designer/JavaDocs/DesignerAPIs/com/ibm/xsp/model/domino/wrapped/DominoDocument.html
  wrappedDoc = DominoDocument.wrap(doc.getParentDatabase().getFilePath(), doc, null, null, false, null, null);
     
  //get the RichText field containing the MIME contents as MIME
  MIMEEntity rtAsMime = doc.getMIMEEntity("mailingBody");
     
  //add the RichText field to the wrapped document
  //see http://public.dhe.ibm.com/software/dw/lotus/Domino-Designer/JavaDocs/DesignerAPIs/com/ibm/xsp/model/domino/wrapped/DominoRichTextItem.html
  DominoRichTextItem drti = new DominoRichTextItem(wrappedDoc, rtAsMime, richTextItemName);
     
  wrappedDoc.setRichTextItem(richTextItemName, drti);
     
  return wrappedDoc;
     
}