We are integrating FusionAuth into our user account / profile system for 3 SaaS apps. We'll have about 5 roles established and the onboarding process for each such user is different.
A new user signup could be brand new, could be existing but for a new role, or could be reactivation of an account. So roughly speaking we might need to establish 3 x 5 x 2 (new and returning user) emails for account verification and then the same number of welcome emails. Each email will have specific instructional text, email subject, and links.
The ability to duplicate email templates in the FusionAuth UI would be useful but clearly this isn't a complete solution. If I create multiple tenants to support our development, testing and production releases - it would really be great to be able to maintain a master list of versioned templates and to link any one of those email template versions to any tenant and app.
If you are familiar with SendGrid - the versioned templates there are pretty nice, as is the conditional logic that can be used in the templates to reduce the total number of documents that must be maintained.
For my sanity and for the maintenance burden associated with these emails, I'd like to use only FusionAuth or only SendGrid for these account maintenance emails. Since SendGrid is the more robust email solution it might be the better choice.
What can be accomplished with FusionAuth's User Actions? Can all FusionAuth email templates can be disabled from the FusionAuthUI and API?
Adding a user from our UI will require creating (or returning) the FusionAuth user, setting the FusionAuth App registration, setting the role, then triggering the necessary email.
It could be really cool if all that can be configured as a multistep User Action that creates / updates and configures the user and then triggers the SendGrid template email.
The versioning and duplicate options for email templates are great ideas. FusionAuth does not currently support email template versioning or copy / duplicate in the UI. Can you open these as feature requests in GitHub? https://github.com/FusionAuth/fusionauth-issues/issues
We do support conditional logic within the template. There is a brief tutorial in the FusionAuth docs. https://fusionauth.io/docs/v1/tech/email-templates/email-templates
To build conditional logic you can use essentially anything that FreeMarker supports. https://freemarker.apache.org/
For example
[#if user.data.favoriteColor == "blue"]
Hi ${user.firstName}, I see you like the color blue.
[#else]
Hi ${user.firstName},
[/#if]
If you have some particular use cases or need some help building the logic in your template feel free to ask for help in the FusionAuth Slack channel or ask here.
That said - SendGrid is in the email game, they will likely have some powerful features not available in FusionAuth. If you require many power user features, I wouldn't try to dissuade you from using SendGrid. But do open feature requests so we can make our email templates as useful as possible.
What can be accomplished with FusionAuth's User Actions?
User actions are sort of free form events that will be sent using our Webhook configuration. They can only be taken on a user that already exists in FusionAuth, so it may not be the right fit for your use case. In addition to User Actions, you can enable events such as user.create
, etc - so you can respond to these types of events in FusionAuth if that is helpful.
Can all FusionAuth email templates can be disabled from the FusionAuthUI and API?
Not sure what you mean - you can disable the SMTP email configuration which implicitly disables all use of email. This can be done via the System Configuration API. https://fusionauth.io/docs/v1/tech/apis/system#update-the-system-configuration See systemConfiguration.emailConfiguration.enabled
. FusionAuth is an API first, so everything you can do in the API you can do through an API.
It could be really cool if all that can be configured as a multistep User Action that creates / updates and configures the user and then triggers the SendGrid template email.
User Actions will not help with this use case. However, you may be able to accomplish this in fewer API calls. If you know the user does not yet exist, you can use the Combo API (Create User + Registration) to create and register the user in one step. https://fusionauth.io/docs/v1/tech/apis/registrations#create-a-user-and-registration-combined
If you omit the roles from this request, the user will be assigned any default roles configured on the application.
If you enable Registration Verification, this will send the user an email of your choosing. This is primarily intended to verify the user intended to register for the application.
The custom workflow idea is a good one however, feel free to open an issue on GitHub. I would envision it as a work flow builder for an application.
Example:
On user registration:
1. Assign role(s): [x] user
[ ] manager
[ ] admin
2. Send email: [select box for email template]