VISUALFORCE EMAIL TEMPLATE WITH COMPONENT TO RENDER ATTACHMENT

Today I am going to share my experience where I had to send email with dynamic attachments. I knew that we could do this easily via Apex code but it is hard to maintain if we have to edit some text or add some value in the template.

Unfortunately we cannot use standard apex:pageblock and apex:pageblocktable tags in Visualforce to generate attachments, so we need to do some modifications to move these over to generic HTML entities.  Additionally, the Visualforce email handler doesn’t know how to use the object name.

To make it so we can send emails with the attachment as well as be able to generate the attachment we will be using Visualforce components and embed it in the Visualforce email template tag.  Below is the html based visualforce component-

AccountPDF

To use this component we will need a Visualforce page which will render it as pdf as below-

Now reference this page in our email template as below-

After saving this, we can test it by clicking the “Send Test and Verify Merge Field” button and choosing a User and an account.

Below is how our VF Template looks like-