You can always use
Multi-part MIME
FYI
More accessible and less spammy!
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Multi-part_MIME
Multi-part mime refers to sending
both an HTML and TEXT part of
an email message in a single email
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Multi-part_MIME
Plain text
HTML
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September_2016
Google adds support for:
• media queries
• embedded stylesheets
• class and ID support
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Is not that bad now
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Example of an email before and after responsive design
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but…
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HTML emails
are here to stay,
and you will need to
build them.
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Case study:
Séntisis Emails
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No content
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No content
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What is behind:
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A typical email with nested tables madness
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No content
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Tables
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Modularization
Logo from the react-icons package
and React
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Components
We created a component
to encapsulate the complexities of
the tables.
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becomes
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No content
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Actual
output
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Components
The Grid component handles the
row and the cells to always
generate a valid HTML table.
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Components
Nested tables get complex and can
lead to non-valid HTML, causing
email parsers to break the layout.
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Empty element
WTF?
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Components
The Grid component can be used as
a wrapper or by using its Cell and
Row components.
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Grid.Cell and Grid.Row components
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No content
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Grid component
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Components
Once we are able to stop thinking
about tables, we can move forward
and continue creating our emails as
a typical React application.
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No content
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Build a weather report
demo email
How_to
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github.com/lang-ai/react-emails
Demo_Repository
Bootstrapped with create-react-app
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No content
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Usage
1. npm install
2. npm run build
3. node example/weather.js
4. Enjoy your generated email
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npm run build
Transpile our React code with Babel
to get rid of the JSX and the ES6 imports
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package.json
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node example/weather.js
Generate a forecast email
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Behind_the_scenes
Connecting the dots
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Behind_the_scenes
1. Fetch weather API for the example
2. Create a React element with the API data by
rendering it on the server
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Behind_the_scenes
3. Add styles and the React element in a placeholder
4. Return the generated HTML
5. Save or send the email
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example/weather.js
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example/weather.js
1. Fetch API data
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example/weather.js
2-4. Generate HTML
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example/weather.js
5. Send or save the email
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How it works
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server/createEmail.js
Optional CSS
to be inlined
Base HTML to add
our styles and content
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server/createEmail.js
Generate our
email HTML
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server/createEmail.js
Add our HTML
and styles to the
placeholder
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server/email-placeholder.html
This gets replaced to
have our final HTML
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Using it for real
Production
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Production
• Used as an npm package
• Transpiles on the npm install hook
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Production
Steps:
• Create a new layout React component
• Pass props to that layout
• Send email
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Usage example
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Layouts
Each email layout is
a React component
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Benefits
1. It’s a React app: same tooling, live reload
2. Remove complexity with wrappers:
3. Ability write logic in the templates
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Building
PDFs
with React
(kind of)
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Case study:
Séntisis Reports
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PDFs are hard
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No content
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No content
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No content
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PDFs are complex
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Avoid complexity
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complexity
uncertainty
scope changes
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Idea
• Node
• React + SSR
• HTML to PDF?
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No content
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No content
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• Open Source command line tool
• Renders HTML into PDF
• Uses the Qt Webkit rendering engine
• Headless (does not require a display service)
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CSS support?
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No content
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It’s not perfect
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Don’t expect top-notch CSS support
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It’s not perfect
but it get’s the job done
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Evolution chart rendered in the PDF
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Build an invoice
demo PDF
How_to
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github.com/lang-ai/react-pdfs
Demo_Repository
Bootstrapped with create-react-app
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No content
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Usage
1. npm install
2. npm run build
3. node example/invoice.js
4. Enjoy your generated PDF
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Behind_the_scenes
Connecting the dots
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Behind_the_scenes
1. Build your components
2. Render the HTML on the server
3. Pass the HTML to wkhtmltopdf
Similar to react-emails
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Same previous process as with react-emails
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How it works
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server/createPDF.js
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No content
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Is there a better way?
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Headless browsers
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Headless browsers
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No content
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No content
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Q: What is the difference between
Puppeteer, Selenium / WebDriver,
and PhantomJS?
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“Puppeteer only works with Chrome and it uses
the latest version of Chromium. In non-testing use
cases, Puppeteer provides a powerful but simple
API because it’s only targeting one browser”
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“Puppeteer bundles Chromium to ensure that the
latest features it uses are guaranteed to be available.”
package.json
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Q: Ok, but why Puppeteer?
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• CSS support
• Export to PDF directly
Benefits
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No content
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Consider navigation to be finished when
there are no network connections for at
least 500 ms
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No content
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Auth & Cookies
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Cookies
We needed permission to get
that user report data
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No content
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We can now fetch the data
and render the report for that user
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No content
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Takeaways
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Takeaways
• React components benefits can be used
outside a typical web application
• “Good enough” is fine
• Ship it
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Takeaways
• React components benefits can be used
outside a typical web application
• “Good enough” is fine
• Ship it