I open this idea as I cannot find one that requests exactly this. I though I had opened one years ago, as this is something I struggle with quite some time (as can also be seen in my attempts to replicate this functionality by using the GraphQL API: https://community.pipefy.com/ask-a-question-78/how-do-i-use-an-api-uploaded-file-as-an-e-mail-attachment-using-the-api-983), but I could not find it. It might have been in the legacy Pipefy roadmap, https://roadmap.pipefy.com/.
There are some ideas and topics that request something similar:
- https://community.pipefy.com/ask-the-community-43/add-an-attachment-from-card-to-email-template-125 asks pretty much exactly this, but it is not made an idea. The corresponding answer does not really solve the problem, but is just a workaround. Why these are not sufficient is explained below.
- https://community.pipefy.com/ideas/ability-to-email-form-as-an-attached-pdf-781 asks similarly for this in an idea, but asks only for a PDF generated from the card, not the card’s PDFs or attachments.
- https://community.pipefy.com/ideas/add-attachments-to-emails-1205 asks similarly, but only for a static PDF that is independent of the card’s fields
Reasons why the workarounds are not sufficient:
- Certain documents don’t work in “just E-Mail” format, they have to be attachments/external documents: invoices for example, or any signed document really.
- Linking to the attachments only works if there is just one document per field. As there are no conditionals possible (see idea here: https://community.pipefy.com/ideas/conditions-in-e-mail-templates-700), nor are loops (see idea here: https://community.pipefy.com/ideas/enable-loops-in-e-mail-templates-1214), having an undefined number of attachments is just not compatible with linking them.
- Having linked documents implies extra clicks for users, in both directions. Using links might therewith be considered frivolous
- The links (if I cannot loop) that require copy-pasting as not clickable additionally look ugly and long — again, that looks untrustworthy if I send such an E-Mail to a client
I see that my title should not have been “Add an attachment from card field to email template”, but “Add attachments from card field to email templates”, to reprise the multiple-attachment point I make in the reasoning.
Hey@genietim , hope you are doing well!
Have you tried to use HTML tag <a href=””></a>? You could insert the attachment field id in this tag and as soon as the user who received the email clicked on it a download would be started automatically.
In order to send multiple attachments, I would recommend attaching a compressed folder with the documents in the attachment field, this way the user would download a .zip file with all the required documents.
<p> <a href="attachment field id">Click here</a> to download the attached document.</p>
P.S.: The only inconvenience is that this artifice will expire in few days.
Hi@Jefferson Dourado ! Thanks for your answer. Yes, the
is what I am currently using. While you are right that it does download automatically, to also automatically open the document after download is a browser, device & configuration specific behaviour, meaning that in some (many? I do not know the statistics), it still means one extra click.
Making a zip out of files served by different users in different phases sure is possible but someone has to do it (requires time), needs to be educated on how to do it and where from to take the files.
In addition to the waiting time for the attachment to download (that would not be present when they were attachments, depending on the E-Mail program), you have to see, that in the sum, given how many clients we send E-Mails to (ideally with attachments) using Pipefy, there are lifes worth of time lost.
TLDR; while your workarounds are a possibility, they have a gigantic time requirement in the sum, something Pipefy would be supposed to reduce.
Wow, this is a really complete and rich in information post, thank you both for that@genietim and @Jefferson Dourado ! I'm submitting the idea along with the comments to our product's team backlog so we can use those as input for when this feature is improved. @Diogo Matheus take a look at this discussion, I remember we talked about it in the past.