5. Sending the Email

Now we’re ready for the final step. We’re going to take each of those story responses and collate them into an email body and then send it off to our recipient.

Service Request: send_email

Navigate to the Build page, go to the Service Requests for our integration, and add a new row. Enter the following values:

• Sequence: 200

• System: EMAIL_SMTP

• Service Name: n/a

• Formula Variable: send_email

• Before Prepare Request Hook: copy and paste the code below. This is the most complicated Python code we have shown to the reader thus far. Basically, we are creating a standard message for each story we received, and writing it to a file. We will later read this file for the body of the email.

  from datetime import datetime
  
  stories = [sr.response.payload for sr in get_story_by_id]
  stories.sort(key=lambda story: story.score, reverse=True)
  
  query_ct = 500 if not input.payload.limitQuery else input.payload.limitQuery
  email_limit = 50 if not input.payload.limitEmail else input.payload.limitEmail
  
  with open_glyuefile("email_body.txt", "w") as file:
      file.write(f"Here are the top {email_limit} of the latest {query_ct} articles from Hacker news:\n\n")
      for story in stories[:email_limit]:
          time = datetime.fromtimestamp(story.time).strftime("%m/%d/%Y, %H:%M")
          file.writelines([
              f"{story.title}\n",
              f"{story.url}\n",
              f"Posted by [{story.by}] on {time} ({story.score} points, {story.descendants} comments)\n",
              f"Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id={story.id}\n\n"
          ])

Field Mappings for SR: send_email

Right-click the newly-created SR and go to Field Mappings. Add 4 rows with these values and then save.

• First row

  • Field: from_address

  • Value: "[e-mail]" (use the same email as was entered for the Email SMTP Adapter Config, and don’t forget the quotes)

  • Value Type: str

• Second row

  • Field: to_addresses

  • Value: [input.payload.email]

  • Value Type: list

• Third row

  • Field: subject

  • Value: "Top HackerNews Stories"

  • Value Type: str

• Fourth row

  • Field: body

  • Value: open_glyuefile("email_body.txt").read()

  • Value Type: str

Don’t forget to save!