16. Notifications

Whenever the status in model Order changes, the built-in Finite State Machine emits a signal using Django’s signaling framework. These signals are received by django-SHOP’s Notification Framework.

16.1. Notification Admin

In Django’s admin backend on Start > Shop > Notification, the merchant can configure which email to send to whom, depending on each of the emitted events. When adding or editing a notification, we get a form mask with four input fields:

16.1.1. Notification Identifier

An arbitrary name used to distinguish the different notifications. It’s up to the merchant to choose a meaningful name, “Order confirmed, paid with PayPal” could for instance be a good choice.

16.1.2. Event Type

Each Order Workflows declares a set of transition targets. For instance, the class PayInAdvanceWorkflowMixin declares these targets: “Awaiting a forward fund payment”, “Prepayment deposited” and “No Payment Required”.

The merchant can attach a notification for each of these transition targets. Here he must choose one from the prepared collection.

16.1.3. The Recipient

Transitions events are transmitted for changes in the order status. Each order belongs to one customer, and normally he’s the first one to be informed, if something changes.

But other persons in the context of this e-commerce site might also be interested into a notification. In django-SHOP all staff Users qualify, as it is assumed that they belong to the group eligible to manage the site.

16.1.4. Email Templates

From the section Start > Post Office > Email Templates, choose on of the Templates for Emails.

16.1.5. Notification attachments

Choose none, one or more static files to be attached to each email. This typically is a PDF with the terms and conditions. We normally want to send them only to our customers, but not to the staff users, otherwise we’d fill up their mail inbox with countless attachments.

16.2. Post Office

Emails for order confirmations are send asynchronously by django-SHOP. The reason for this is that it sometimes takes a few seconds for an application server to connect via SMTP, and deliver an Email. It is unacceptable to do this synchronously during the most sensitive phase of a purchase operation.

Therefore django-SHOP sends all generated emails using the queuing mail system Post Office. This app can hold a set of different email templates, which use the same template language as Django itself. Emails can be rendered using plain text, HTML or both.

When emails are queued, the chosen template object is stored side by side with its context serialized as JSON. These queued emails are accessible in Django’s admin backend at Start > Post Office > Emails. Their status can either be “queued”, “sent” or “failed”.

As an offline operation, ./manage.py send_queued_mail renders and sends queued emails to the given recipient. During this step, the given template is rendered applying the stored context. Their status then changes to “sent”, or in case of a problem to “failed”.

If django-SHOP is configured to run in a multilingual environment, post office renders the email in the language used during order creation.

16.2.1. Templates for Emails

The Message fields can contain any code, which is valid for Django templates. Frequently, a summary of the order is rendered in these emails, creating a list of ordered items. This list often is common across all email templates, and therefore it is recommended to prepare it in a base template for being reused. In the merchants project folder, create those base email templates inside the folder templates/myshop/email/.... Then inside the Message fields, these templates can be loaded and expanded using the well known templatetag

{% extends "myshop/email/somebase.html" %}

16.2.1.1. Caveats when using an HTML Message

Displaying HTML in email clients is a pain. Nobody really can say, which HTML tags are allowed in which client – and there are many email readers out there, far more than Internet browsers.

Therefore when designing HTML templates for emails, one must be really, really conservative. It may seem anachronistic, but still a best practice is to use the <table> element, and if necessary, nest it into their <td> (tables data) elements. Moreover, use inline styles rather than a <style> element containing blocks of CSS. It is recommended to use a special email framework to avoid nasty quirks, when rendering the templates.

Images can be embedded into HTML emails using two different methods. One is to host the image on the web-server and to build an absolute URI referring it. Therefore django-SHOP enriches the object RenderContext with the base URI for that web-site and stores it as context variable named ABSOLUTE_BASE_URI. For privacy reasons, most email clients do not load externally hosted images by default – the customer then must actively request to load them from the external sources.

Another method for adding images to HTML emails is to inline their payload. This means that images, instead of referring them by URI, are inlined as a base64-encoded string. Easy-thumbnails offers a template filter named data_uri to perform this operation. This of course blows up the overall size of an email and shall only be used for small an medium sized images.