Sitecore 10.1 Form Send E-mail VS Community Send E-mail

March 30, 2021 Rodrigo Peplau 0

Experience Forms debuted in 2017 with the Initial Release of Sitecore 9.0. With the mission to replace “Webforms For Marketers” (WFFM), it started pretty small. Lots of features were not available in the beginning, some of them taking several years to arise.

To be precise, part of the community still thinks it has a long road to catch up with WFFM…

Sending Email Messages with Experience Forms

One of the biggest gaps was the “Send Email Message” action, not present until very recently in Sitecore 10.1. For more than 3 years, the only supported way was the EXM integration, as my friend João Neto explains in this post.

Noticed the gap, I implemented a free module to provide the community with this feature. Until these days, this is still my most popular module.

But what are the similarities and differences between the two actions? Today, I take a deep dive into the new feature and compare it with my community module.

 

Installation and Configuration

The new official action comes out-of-the-box. This is convenient compared to external modules: no packages to install. An advantage to Sitecore!

In both cases, you’ll need to fill the SMTP settings with a configuration patch file. You can use the same patch from my module, with localhost settings – Counterstrike!

 

User Interface

The new action has a nice GUI to configure the action, enabling content editors to write messages in a nice way.

I have to admit, this is much better than having to edit e-mail the templates beforehand.

 

The new GUI also provides token selection, so now you don’t have to remember the exact field names.

Well, well… looks like the team in charge of this implementation worked very hard! 

 

Keyword replacement with Form Data

Both actions use the same strategy for data replacement, with field named tokens that are replaced with the respective form data. Sitecore uses the [fieldname] format, while the community uses {fieldname}, which is practically the same.

But again, when it comes to the new GUI and the ability to visually select your tokens from the form fields, the new action is much superior for content editors.

Keyword replacement oddities

There are still some oddities with keyword replacement, that could be easy fixes. Who knows if Sitecore will ever get back to this simple, but very important feature? They should.

No replacement allowed with e-mail fields

It feels strange that none of the e-mail fields (To, Cc, Bcc, and From) can use token replacement. This makes it impossible to send messages using addresses collected in a form.

The “From” field is even more limited, as it does not allow to type e-mail addresses. Instead, the editor should select the submitter in a dropdown. To add new submitters to the list, you have to create new items under the following path:

/sitecore/system/Settings/Forms/Meta Data/Address Book/Senders

This is a serious limitation: the community module allows tokens in any field. This feature is crucial when you want to send emails to (and from) addresses collected in the form. You can’t send a message to the submitted address, or to the right department as selected in a dropdown field.

Defective replacement with the Subject field

Testing the new action, my first submission failed without any visual feedback. The log file showed this curious message:

ERROR [Experience Forms]: The specified string is not in the form required for a subject.

This started to make more sense when you look at the way I configured the subject:

And the content of the “Multi” field when I submitted this form:

It worked fine when I removed the line breaks, so this bug is due to them. This would be an easy fix for future releases. Keep this in mind when you use tokens in the subject, and you will save some precious debugging time!

 

Compatibility

The new action is only available from Sitecore 10.1 and higher. The community module is still the easiest way to submit e-mails from 9.0 to 10.0, which ensures its relevancy. At least until most of the Sitecore instances are 10.1+. A good clue is the end of mainstream support, found at the Sitecore Product Support Lifecycle:

Product	Mainstream Support End Date
Sitecore 10.0	31-Dec-2023
Sitecore 9.3	31-Dec-2022
Sitecore 9.2	31-Dec-2022
Sitecore 9.1	31-Dec-2021

 

Full comparison table

If you reached the end of this article and are still unsure, here is a “very unbiased” comparison table:

	Sitecore’s Send Email	Community’s Send Email
Installation	Out of the box	Installable module
Configuration	Configuration file	Configuration file
User Interface	Amazing GUI	Content Editor
Form Data Replacement	Replacement oddities	Total freedom
Compatibility	Sitecore 10.1 and above	Sitecore 9 and above
Developer is awesome	Yes	Yes
Developer can sing	No	Yes

I think it’s a draw!

Categories: Experience Forms, Sitecore Community, Sitecore Modules