Using Liquid markup to reveal CCs in a notification email

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Last week, Andrey shared a great tip on how to use Liquid markup to randomize your automated responses, but what if you want to reveal information to a customer that is normally only available in the Web interface right in the notification email? Liquid to the rescue!

While there are many pieces of information you might want to display in your notifications, one of the most common requests we get is for the ability to display who else is CCed on a particular request. After all, it can be quite useful to see who else is monitoring your request without having to waste any time logging in.

Using Liquid to display CCs

Liquid markup makes this quite simple. Just add this block of code to any triggers or automations in which you'd like your CCs to be listed:

{% if ticket.cc_names != empty %}

{% capture ccedusers %}

{% for cc in ticket.ccs %}
{% unless forloop.last %}
{{ cc.email | append: ', ' }}
{% else %}
{{ cc.email }}
{% endunless %}
{% endfor %}

{% endcapture %}

{{ ccedusers | strip_newlines }}

{% else %}

Nobody

{% endif %}

Note: This will only list the CCs by email address. You'll want to add some text to clarify that these email addresses belong to users who are CCed on this request, as well as any formatting you would like.

Here is what that might look like in a trigger:

...and how that would actually render in the email client:

Breaking it down

Now that we have the code, let's break down exactly what it does so that you can modify it for your needs.

We want to make sure that if there aren't any CCs on the request that we don't just leave an empty line, so we start by wrapping the code in a "If...Else" statement to print "Nobody" if the ticket doesn't have any CCs, and to list those CCs if it does.

{% if ticket.cc_names != empty %}

...
{% else %}

Nobody

{% endif %}

If the request does have some CCs, we'll need to grab them and apply some formatting to prevent them from all being globbed together. We start by creating the "ccedusers" variable to hold all of the CC'ed email addresses with some of our formatting applied so that we can easily reference them later.

{% capture ccedusers %}
...
{% endcapture %}

Next, we will iterate over all of the CCs on the ticket, grab the email address for each, and add them to our email variable separated by a ', ' (for all but the last CC) to make them more readable.

{% for cc in ticket.ccs %}
{% unless forloop.last %}
{{ cc.email | append: ', ' }}
{% else %}
{{ cc.email }}
{% endunless %}
{% endfor %}

Lastly, we need to actually print out the freshly constructed list of email addresses. We do this with the following line, making sure we strip the "newline" characters that would otherwise list each email address individually on its own line.

{{ ccedusers | strip_newlines}}

Alternatives

Remember how I said before that this list would only include the CCed user's email addresses? What if you'd like to display their names as well? We can adjust that output in this section. To show the users in the common "Name" <email_address> format, you'd instead use the following code:

{% if ticket.cc_names != empty %}

{% capture ccedusers %}

{% for cc in ticket.ccs %}
{% unless forloop.last %}
{{ cc.name | prepend: '"' | append: '" '}} {{ cc.email | prepend:'<' | append: '>, ' }}
{% else %}
{{ cc.name | prepend: '"' | append: '" '}} {{ cc.email | prepend:'<' | append: '>' }}
{% endunless %}
{% endfor %}

{% endcapture %}

{{ ccedusers | strip_newlines | replace:'&quot','"' | replace:'&lt','<' | replace:'&gt','>' | replace:';','' }}

{% else %}

Nobody is CC'd

{% endif %}

Note: The above code has an adjustment to the line that prints the "ccedusers" variable to replace the escaped HTML entities in the capture block with literals. This is a consequence of how we render our email notifications  

Liquid is powerful

I hope that this has helped get you started in thinking about the powerful customization options available to you with Liquid markdown.

For a complete list of placeholders available to you, please refer to our Placeholders Reference . If you'd like to learn more about how to use Liquid, checkout the excellent Liquid for Designers guide. As always, if you have any questions please let us know!