Tip: How to add conditionals to your Zendesk email template to use custom HTML layouts

How to add conditionals to your Zendesk email template to use custom HTML layouts

Zendesk level:  Intermediate
Knowledge:  Liquid, HTML, Email Template Editing, Trigger Template Editing
Time Required:  10 minutes

Documentation, customizations, and troubleshooting on GitHub: https://github.com/Ajhad1/Zendesk-Customizations/tree/main/email/How-to-add-conditionals-to-your-Zendesk-email-template-to-use-custom-HTML-layouts

Where we came from https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/1260802142170/comments/1260802990209

Use Case:

Many companies have different departments and different languages and other differences between their many support tickets. A great way to help customers understand/notice the differences is to create different branding based on any of these factors. For example, creating a heading that updates based on the specific group a customer is dealing with.

How it works (simplified):

An invisible HTML element is added to each trigger that allows for parsing at the email template level. 

How to Use It:

Pass whatever data needed for the conditional. Modify the conditional to search for whatever data is required.

Prerequisites:

• You must be using Zendesk Support.
• You must have edit access to the email template.
• You must have edit access to the triggers.

How to Install:

• Add code to the respective location. GitHub
• Modify conditional based on your needs.
• That's it.

Explanation:

In this example, I am passing the {{ticket.tags}} in the invisible "div" and then escaping the {{content}} and then creating an array by parsing the {{content}} using a space as a delimiter.

This allows for a conditional to check for specific tags in the {{content}} without having the recipient seeing them. 

Notes:

• There is plenty of things that can be done to avoid false positives. The first that comes to mind is only running the conditional on the invisible "div"
• This is more of a proof of concept than anything else.
• This does work as is but there may be issues with false positives.
• If anyone would like to add some validation or other code improvements, I have no issue with updating the article to reflect.