Body property

Represents the body of an email sent through an email report button.

If this property is not set, a default body is used. If the format of the email report button calls for a file to be attached (containing, say, a PDF document), the default body includes instructions in English on how to open the attached file. By setting a body explicitly through this property, you can fully determine the email body yourself.

If the format of the button is set to text, field values are included directly in the email body and are not part of an attached file. In this case, the body as set through this property appears just before the text that appears before field values in the email body. If the format is set to text, the default body is empty.

Building the body of an email with a formula

Associate a formula with this property to determine the email body using values entered in your app and logic that derives from these values. Use & to join various text strings together for use in the body. Use the NEWLINE function to produce line breaks, enabling the email body to consist of multiple paragraphs.

Consider this formula:

The formula above sets the email body to something like the following:

Dear Sally,

The weight is 23.30 lbs.

Creating a list of field values

Calcapp can be instructed to incorporate fields and their values in your email body, without your having to write any formulas. Simply set the format to text and decide which fields to include—which can be done using the IncludedFields property—and Calcapp will produce a table of fields and their values, right in your email body.

What if you, for reasons of maximum flexibility, want to produce this list using a formula? If your screen contains 100 fields, referencing them one by one in a formula is not appealing:

Luckily, Calcapp supports a compact way of referencing many fields at once. Field1:Field5Field1:Field5 creates an array bookended by Field1 and Field5, with all the fields that appear between them sandwiched between them (like Field2, Field3 and Field4).

For the purposes of the examples below, let's assume that Field1:Field5Field1:Field5 is equivalent to { Field1, Field2, Field3, Field4, Field5 }{ Field1; Field2; Field3; Field4; Field5 } and that their values are 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5, in that order.

A formula associated with Body must return a text string, whereas Field1:Field5Field1:Field5 is an array of fields. To convert their values to a single text string, TEXTJOIN may be used:

This results in the values of all fields being joined together in a single text string, separated by commas: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

What if every value should appear on its own line? Simply replace the first parameter with NEWLINE, causing all values to be separated by line breaks:

This is the text produced by the formula:

1
2
3
4
5

Including the field label

Just having a list of values isn't very descriptive, though. To include the field label in the body, use the Label property of fields:

Here's the end result (assuming that the label of every field is identical to its name):

Field1: 1
Field2: 2
Field3: 3
Field4: 4
Field5: 5

Omitting blank values and hidden fields

Calcapp's native support for including field values in the email body supports omitting blank values and hidden fields. If the field values are produced through a Body formula, we can achieve the same effect using the FILTER function.

This formula returns the array { 20, 30 }{ 20; 30 }, because only 2 and 3 are greater than 1:

The second parameter to FILTER is a logical array with the same number of elements as the first array, where TRUE elements indicate that the corresponding element in the first array should be included in the returned array from FILTER, and FALSE elements indicate that they should not be.

Applying this logic to fields, the following formula returns an array containing only fields whose values are not blank, using the ISDEFINED function:

If the Field1:Field5Field1:Field5 range includes elements that are not fields (like a button appearing directly after Field1), those elements will generally be included. In order to only include fields with non-blank values, the Value property can be specified explicitly:

This formula only includes visible fields:

To transform these fields and their values to a text string suitable for use with the Body property, we should add the MAP function to our arsenal, which is the topic of the next section.

Transforming field arrays to email bodies with MAP

MAP takes an array as its first parameter and a formula fragment that transforms every array element as its second parameter. Ultimately, MAP returns an array of all the transformed array elements, in the original order. This MAP formula transforms the array { 1, 2, 3 }{ 1; 2; 3 } into the array { 10, 20, 30 }{ 10; 20; 30 } by multiplying every element with 10:

The reason we need MAP is because otherwise we need to repeat the FILTER invocation every time we reference the field array. With MAP, we can do it just once, and then transform the value using a formula fragment.

The FILTER formula must be given as the first parameter to MAP, to enable the field values to be included in an email body. This formula only includes values of visible fields:

Here's an equivalent formula which does not use MAP:

Examples