Hello,
I’m curious if it’s possible to create an “Info Shopping Cart” in Knack; where a customer would be able to view a list of records, each containing sales brochures links, add them to a cart (I assume add a connected record via record action, w/ their customer ID as an identifier so mgmt can see what people are requesting), view the cart, and email the list of links to themselves.
The main function I see that’s missing right now, is that you cannot embed a list of records into an email. You can only embed the value of fields within one record.
We already do this via an email template and another program (see image below for an example), but it’d be nice to do this through Knack and also do this via the API.
Has anyone ever done this? Just curious if there’s a simple way.
Example of Email Received of the Selected items in the cart:
When I need to create emails with lists of connected records, I use Integromat to build the email. The basic process is to trigger the Scenario from the main record and then have a step which loads all of the child records and then uses an aggregator module to create a table of the child records. Then you can send an email with the table within it.
You can see some of the techniques required to do this in various Integromat based articles on my blog:
Hope this helps - the combination of Knack and Integromat makes an incredibly powerful toolset for building a wide variety of solutions!
Thanks so much Julian! After a quick glance through your blog topics, there’s a LOT I can learn from you. This shopping cart is an item on my list for testing in the future, so I’ll most likely revisit this again when I put the rubber to the road.
Can you point me to any specific blog post(s) that you discuss aggregating the records and embedding a table in an email? That’d be super helpful. Take care!
Looking through there isn’t a perfect match when it comes to this - the nearest is:
HOWEVER, this discusses creating a PDF with a table of records within it (similar but slightly different). Also note that Integromat deprecated their PDF module (great shame) and now you need to use something like CloudConvert to do this.
Maybe it’s time for me to do a new post on this just creating an email with embedded table - I actually do this quite a bit for clients.
Yes, it’d be interesting to know if it’s possible. Generating the email is one thing, then I will eventually run into questions about using the API to build the shopping cart. Some things are easy, but there’s a few things that I’d need to dig into (for example, sending a call to clear all the records pertaining to a user’s cart). I’m sure anything is possible, but I’m only exploring if an easy/duplicatable processes exists. Luckily, there’s no immediate need for this, it’s only a feature I’m exploring for the future.
Either way, I’m happy to have found your blog as a resource among others. Knack users are great at helping one another.
I decided to make a post about using Integromat for this - you can read it here:
In terms of a Shopping Cart - you can build the whole thing directly in Knack and then process payments directly through PayPal and / or Stripe. I have several clients with Knack e-commerce apps up and running.
For some reason I didn’t receive a notification that you posted this! What a great use of Integromat to gather the data and send the email. Very cool indeed. You made it seem a lot less scary than I thought. Thanks for putting this all together.
I wonder if the email can be sent via a trigger of some kind; like an API call, perhaps a POST call to a form and trigger the email. As I mentioned, I don’t have an immediate need for this just yet, but some day this would be neat to connect to my interactive touch screens.
