VBCS: Action Handlers, send an email

Within VBCS, Virtual Builder Cloud Service, you can add custom actions in menus or on buttons. We will explore this feature in this blog by allowing people who visit our Tech17 application to send an email to a speaker.

Within the REST service, I added the email field, so it does now come back in the collection as well. I changed the extension and business objects accordingly, I will not cover that in this blog post.

The result of the service now looks something like this.

On the existing Speakers page, from the common section, I drag & drop a button into the list view item. On the right hand side, I select the Action tab, the hand with the arrow next to the pointing index finger.

When clicking the green ‘Add Action’ button, you see a couple of predefined actions. However, we want to do a custom action, so we click the ‘Add Custom Action’.

This brings us to the custom action screen, in where we can choose out of a lot predefined custom actions. Using this actions you can define a flow of actions that you want to happen when pressing the button. Under Miscellaneous, there is and ‘Compose Email’ option, which I drag and drop into the center.

The ‘Compose Email’ dialog will appear.

In the dialog, I can either enter data myself or we can select it. When clicking the data icon, I select the Speaker Business Object, after which the E-mail field is automatically selected, because it is configured as mail property.

It will be selected and entered in the inputfield.

After this, I add the ‘Message about the nlOUG’ as subject. I want to have a convenience in the body, by starting with the Speakers name, which I can select again from the business object.

After this, pressing Done on the top right will bring us back to the speaker page.

Now that the page is done, we can press the run icon and run the page to test our new functionality.

Pressing the ‘Send Email’ button next to my own name, opens the email client on my laptop and start a new email. It will fill the To, Subject and even the name in the start of the body!