Sitecore EXM - issue with long name emails

 Sitecore EXM - emails with long names

Our customer is using Sitecore Email Experience Manager to send campaigns (e-mails) to their contacts.  We got notified that they had an issue with a specific campaign that was not sending. 

First of all we noticed that the email was completely blocked in the EXM management tool. We could not de-activate it to try to change anything which was pretty weird. Luckily the logs showed us some meaningful information.

ERROR Exception: Sitecore.Exceptions.InvalidItemNameException

Message: An item name lenght should be less or equal to 100.

Source: Sitecore.Kernel

   ....

   at Sitecore.EmailCampaign.Cm.Pipelines.DispatchNewsletter.DeployAnalytics.AddCampaignItem(MessageItem message)

 

An item name lenght should be less or equal to 100

Yes, item length - that is the issue. (including the typo in the exception message 😊)

But what item name? Yes, the name of the email was long, but not that long. EXM does check the length of the name - just try to type more than 100 characters in the name field of a new regular mail and it will turn red. 

Let's have another look at the trace in the error message - it seems to be from "AddCampaign" and that rings a bell. When a regular email is created, Sitecore also creates a campaign item in /sitecore/system/Marketing Control Panel/Campaigns. When we check the names of the items there it seems to be the name of the mail campaign with the item id (guid). This means that this item is 36 characters longer than the mail name - leaving us with only 64 characters for the mail name. 

Which is fine - if you know it. And yes, that should be checked in EXM. You can consider this a bug -it is- but I'm not going to patch a solution for it. 

Fix ?

We could try and patch it ourselves, but it's actually not worth the effort. We could also increase the MaxItemNameLength but again - don't seem worth it. Note that we are talking about the name of the mail campaign, not the subject or anything the end customer would see.

So we decided to just fix the impacted mail and inform the customer to use shorter names in future (until we move the solution to Sitecore Send 😛)

Fixing locked mail items

Fixing the item seemed to be not that easy actually as it was really locked. I could not deactivate it to edit it. An old trick to the rescue, described on Sitecore Stack Exchange (of course... ) in another situation but still very useful. 

Go to the content editor and locate the mail item. Unprotect it and make the changes you want - in this case shorten the title.  Protect the item again - use the "Open EXM" button to go to the item where you now can de-active and activate again.  And that should fix your mail.

Conclusion

One more reason to start moving the mail part of the solution to Send...

Sitecore Forms Send Email Campaign message

Sitecore Forms 9.0 Update-1 rev. 171219

Sitecore release it's Update-1 version of the platform. In this version they included EXM (Email Experience Manager) as out-of-the-box part of the product. No more separate module..  like they did with Forms before. This change also had some (expected) changes to the Forms module. In the initial release version there was no submit action that could send an email. We expected this to be introduced together with EXM and that was a correct assumption.

So.. we have a "Send Email Campaign message" submit action now.

Send Email Campaign message submit action

I tried to do a quick test on a vanilla install of the platform:

1. Create an automated campaign in EXM (how-to)
2. Test the campaign - yes, the test mail arrived perfectly.
3. Create a form (any form will do), added a few fields and all wanted save actions, amongst which the "Send Email Campaign Message" - place it before the redirect ;)
   The save action will allow you to select a campaign - my newly created campaign was in the list so I selected that one.
4. Add the form to a page (we had to create/generate an mvc layout for this*)
5. Publish everything and let's try this...

Submit the form with some test data.. and.. damn..  "Failed to send email!" 

In the Sitecore logs I found more information:  ERROR Contact id is null.

As I am not that familiar with EXM (yet), as probably quite a lot of others, I was not aware that I could only send a mail to a known contact. Sitecore Support helped me on this one, so now I figured out that I do need to identify my contact first.

To send an email with the "Send Email Campaign Message" action, your contact needs to be identified.

Sound reasonable, but the (first) problem is that there is no out-of-the-box submit action to do this. Luckily all you need to do this yourself has been documented on the official doc site.  (still weird that they can document it, but not put it in the product...).

Documentation on the submit action could have saved me some time, so hopefully this small post will help someone.

Further usage

We did not find a way to send the form data in the message (without customizing the save action) - unless the form data is all in the contact data, which probably is not the case.

We also haven't found a solution to send the email to someone else - not the person who submitted the form. The mail will be send to the identified contact.

Conclusion

I must admit I was hoping Update-1 would have more impact on the Forms part of the product. I was also hoping the "Send Email" functionality would be in there. One could say it is, but without custom code is useless. Let's get our hopes up for Update-2...

Questions?

For questions on the topic, please find me (and many other Sitecore folks) on Sitecore Slack or Stack Exchange.

Is your custom automated campaign is not showing in the Send Email Campaign Message Action? See https://sitecore.stackexchange.com/a/11511/237

* Sitecore Forms is MVC only - and the vanilla setup of Sitecore still comes with a default WebForms homepage 😞