About the Automation Email Action API

The Automation Email Action API manages the email content of a "send email" action within a site's automation: the subject line, preview text, and editor content sent when the action runs.

With the Automation Email Action API, you can:

• Retrieve and update a send email action's email content.
• Preview the rendered email content without sending it.
• Send a test email to check how the content looks in a real inbox.

Send email actions are configured as part of a site's automation using the Automations V2 API. The Automation Email Action API manages an existing action's email content only. It doesn't create the action itself.

Before you begin

It's important to note the following points before starting to code:

• An action's content isn't identified by an ID of its own. Address it by the automationId of the automation it belongs to and the actionId of the send email action within that automation. Find these values by retrieving the site's automations with the Automations V2 API and looking for an APP_DEFINED action whose actionKey is triggered-emails.
• A preinstalled automation starts out sharing its email content with every other site running the same automation. Get Email Content and Preview Email Content serve this shared content until a site edits it. Send Test Email requires content the site owns, so update it once first.
• Set Email Content replaces the stored content in full. The most reliable way to make a change is to first call Get Email Content and modify the result, rather than building the content from scratch. This matters especially for composer.composerDataJson, a proprietary structure: an invalid value can prevent the content from being previewed or sent.
• On a multilingual site, language selects a single translation of the content. Content structure is shared across languages, so only the text differs between them.

Use cases

• Edit a preinstalled automation's email content for the first time
• Preview and test email content before it goes live

Terminology

• Automation: A workflow, configured with the Automations V2 API, that runs a set of actions when a trigger occurs.
• Send email action: An automation action whose action key is triggered-emails, which sends an email when the automation runs.
• Preinstalled automation: An automation added to every site that installs the app that created it, rather than being specific to a single site.