Notification Emails Overview

The email notification system in Dimensions CM is designed to provide more control over email notification and content, and also to provide a mechanism that enables administrators to configure which particular users/groups receive email notifications. The new notification system is designed to work together with the existing email notification mechanism and if switched on via subscriptions, will replace the standard default Dimensions CM email notifications.

There are a number of standard, or system, notifications defined to which a user or group can be subscribed. For details, see Notification Types.

This subscription process is performed by an administrator with the appropriate privilege. For details, see Using the Email Notification System.

After one or more users have been subscribed to a particular notification, the default emails, which are usually sent to everyone with the appropriate role, will be "switched off" in favor of the new subscriptions. In this way, an administrator can configure users to only receive those notifications that are relevant to them and disable all other spam email.

When using the default email notification system, email messages are sent immediately whenever a command is run. This can mean that systems with a slow connection to the email server can suffer from an unnecessary time lag before the command completes. The new email subscription system however, writes every email event to the database to allow it to be processed "on-batch" via a new utility called dmemail at a later time. This means that commands are no longer tied to the response time of the email server, and also allows a system administrator much more flexibility as to scheduling when emails are processed.

The dmemail utility allows much more fine-grained control over the processing of email than is provided by the default mail system and can be configured to run either as a scheduled task or "on demand". This utility scans all the email events that are pending to be sent, applies the various email templates, and sends the resulting email to the subscribed users. For details, see Using the dmemail Utility.

This email subscription model supports the use of email templates to enable the administrator to customize the email content which is sent to users. The templating syntax, which is used within the template files, is the same as that used for writing remote jobs and build templates. It can support complex IF/ELSE constructs and other control conditions. For more information on this syntax, see the Developer's API Reference.

The `DM_EMAIL_TEMPLATE_DIR` variable in the Dimensions CM dm.cfg file controls the location of the templates. By default, the templates are located under the $<DM_ROOT> directory in the email_templates subdirectory. One template file exists for each subscribable notification, and can be found using the Administration Console. By default, these templates support HTML syntax.

Related Topics

About Mail Notifications

Subscribing Users and Groups to Mail Events