Instantiating an email template with Web API

There is email template functionality in Dynamics/model-driven applications – if you are not familiar with it, have a look at the documentation first:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/customer-engagement/admin/create-templates-email

However, what if, for whatever reason, you wanted to automatically instantiate an email template instead of having to use “insert template button” on the email screen?

For example, maybe there are a few frequently used templates, so you might want to add a flyout button to the command bar as a shortcut for those templates.

This is what you can use InsantiateTemplate action for:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/customer-engagement/web-api/instantiatetemplate?view=dynamics-ce-odata-9

And below is a javascript code sample which will do just that, just make sure to

• Replace those parameters with the propert templateid, objecttype, and object id
• Instead of displaying the alerts, do something with the subject and description you will get back from the action call

function InstantiateEmailTemplate()
{
    var parameters = {
        "TemplateId": "00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000",//GUID
        "ObjectType": "logicalname",//Entity logical name, lowercase
        "ObjectId": "00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000"//record id for the entity above
    };

    var requestUrl = "/api/data/v9.1/InstantiateTemplate";
 
    var context;
 
    if (typeof GetGlobalContext === "function") {
        context = GetGlobalContext();
    } else {
        context = Xrm.Page.context;
    };

    var req = new XMLHttpRequest();
    req.open("POST", context.getClientUrl() + requestUrl, true);
    req.setRequestHeader("OData-MaxVersion", "4.0");
    req.setRequestHeader("OData-Version", "4.0");
    req.setRequestHeader("Accept", "application/json");
    req.setRequestHeader("Content-Type", "application/json; charset=utf-8");
    req.onreadystatechange = function () {
        if (this.readyState === 4) {
            req.onreadystatechange = null;
            if (this.status === 200) {
                var result = JSON.parse(this.response);
                //DO SOMETHING WITH THE RESPONSE HERE
                alert(result.value[0].subject);
                alert(result.value[0].description);
            } else {
                var errorText = this.responseText;
                alert(errorText);
            }
        }
    };
    req.send(JSON.stringify(parameters));
}

PS. Here is the terrible part.. I’ve written the post above, and, then, a colleague of mine came up and said “Hey, I found this other post: https://www.inogic.com/blog/2019/01/execute-action-using-xrm-webapi-online-execute-in-dynamics-365-crm-v9-0/  ”

Of course, those Inogic folks.. they even have the same blog theme! Well, maybe I have the same.. Anyway, I figured I’d count the number of lines in each version and you know what? If you remove empty lines and alerts in my version, it turns out to be a shorter one! Well, the old ways are not, always, worse, but they are still old 🙂 So, make sure to read that post by Inogic.