Thursday, 22 February 2018

Nintex Workflow: Parse Email Content

A - OBJECTIVE: to provide a practical example of Nintex Workflows (used in SharePoint 2013) which can be used to parse email content.

B - PROBLEM :

HTML emails sent to a SharePoint list (incoming email is enabled) in a readable format: 
Field Name 1: Field Value 1 
Field Name 2: Field Value 2 
Field Name 3: 28/02/2018 12:00:00 AM...
There are some known issues such as:

  1. A variable of type "Multiple lines of text" cannot be printed in full at Nintex for review purpose. A test done at the function Log in history list only showed a string of ~250 characters.
  2. It's not straightforward to replace a character (e.g. new line \n) with a white space.
  3. The function "Query XML" expects to have an input properly HTML-formatted.
C - SOLUTION:

Configuration-wise, 

  • the feature incoming email must be enabled so that an encrypted email (.eml) can be sent to the list.
  • the column "Body" should have the type "Enhanced Rich Text" (or else, a pair of field name & field value will not be in the same line)

Nintex-wise,

 Step 1: Get the incoming email body:
Step 2: Strip all unexpected HTML tags, such as: <html>, </html>, <head>, </head>, <body>, </body>, <br>, <p>, </p>, etc ; and append the proper HTML tags to the string.
Step 3: use the function "Query XML" to extract all pairs of name & value, the output should be a collection of lines:
Step 4: count the number of pairs (in terms of the number of lines):

Step 5: at each line, we should (1) remove the special character \n , (2) split the line based on the pattern ":" and save the result in a collection, (3) process the line to find out the value is a string or a date, & (4) assign the value to the proper workflow variable:


Step 6: finally, you can use the workflow variables to create an item at other list with the mapped columns.

D - SOURCE CODE: 

Step 1: with the variable Body is multiple lines of text.

Step 2: BodyHTML is multiple lines of text:
Append the proper HTML format:

 Step 5:







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