Introduction

Creating new notification or certificate templates has its challenges since rendering (code execution) is happening in a black box where debugging is difficult and no breakpoints possible.

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Throwing explicit exceptions and checking variables whether an object lookup was successful would help with debugging and on live systems to look into issues.

Template for the certificate template:

Other (real world) examples can be found in Git Core repository in

• CustomerAssets\certificateTemplates

• CustomerAssets\notificationTemplates

Example of a ‘Bad’ Template

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Always check if the requested object does exist - check for null. If an object was expected and is required for rendering throw an explicit error with as much detail as possible so debugging and live-site-investigations is easier.

Develop Print Layout

Chrome has the ability to render a print version of a page instead of needing to open the print menu to see the print layout. This could reduce dev time for the print version.

Open Chrome > Dev Tools (F11)-> three dots -> More tools -> Rendering -> emulate CSS media type

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Set page size to whatever page you need to print:

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Testing Print Layout

The preceding Dev Tools printing emulation should be viewed with caution. There are still many bugs with the tool as of this writing (Feb 2023). For example: print margins and positions are not accurately reflected when actually printing:

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For this reason, any testing using this print emulation would be invalid. They should only be used for development.

Known Issues

Render Notification Template for Deleted Course

If a course gets deleted, the course name is not available anymore. Therefore, some notifications fail to get rendered because assembling the TVM dictionary entries fails. This is a known bug in GetAllTemplateParameters.

This issue mainly happens for pre-expiry notifications IsCategory(Certificate,PreExpiry) - see error below.

Error

2024-10-27 17:00:10,343 [ERROR] {Email-NotificationChannel Thread} |NotificationManager.Impl.NotificationChannelEmail| *Core-Service-Lindblad* Service - Email-NotificationChannel: Unexpected exception for queue item Id = '9100852c-94bf-11ef-911f-ac1f6b46ac39'
System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.
   at MarineLMS.Model.Impl.CertificateNotification.GetAllTemplateParameters(TimeZoneInfo targetTimeZone)
   at MarineLMS.NotificationManager.Impl.NotificationChannelEmail.AppendTemplateParametersFromTarget(ICoreUnitofWork uow, IChannelQueueItem item, String emailTo)
   at MarineLMS.NotificationManager.Impl.NotificationChannelEmail.DeliverItem(ICoreUnitofWork uow, IChannelQueueItem item)
2024-10-27 17:00:10,359 [ERROR] {Email-NotificationChannel Thread} |NotificationManager.Impl.NotificationChannelEmail| *Core-Service-Lindblad* Service - Email-NotificationChannel: Unexpected exception for queue item Id = '9100852e-94bf-11ef-911f-ac1f6b46ac39'
System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.
   at MarineLMS.Model.Impl.CertificateNotification.GetAllTemplateParameters(TimeZoneInfo targetTimeZone)
   at MarineLMS.NotificationManager.Impl.NotificationChannelEmail.AppendTemplateParametersFromTarget(ICoreUnitofWork uow, IChannelQueueItem item, String emailTo)
   at MarineLMS.NotificationManager.Impl.NotificationChannelEmail.DeliverItem(ICoreUnitofWork uow, IChannelQueueItem item)

Workaround

Ignore the error because the pre-expiry notification should not be sent.

Related Documents

Certificate Template Resource Structure using File Collections

Workflow to Release Certificate Template Files

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