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Workflow email template placeholders in Dynamics 365 FO (AX) – any others?

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Posted on by SS-27121216-0

I am working on a Purchase Order Approval Workflow in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations. I am trying to customize the email template (Email ID), but I have encountered two main challenges regarding the email body:

Specific Placeholders: In the Email ID (HTML) template, I can only use standard placeholders like %message%, %subject%, and %for%. I want to use more specific fields like Vendor Account (%PurchTable.VendAccount%) directly in the HTML body of the email template, but they are not being rendered and appear as plain text in the received emails.
Dynamic Line Items: My purchase orders usually contain multiple lines. I need to display these lines (Item Name, Quantity, Unit, and Price) in a dynamic HTML table within the email notification. Since the standard email editor doesn't seem to support loops (foreach) or dynamic tables, what is the best practice to achieve this within the workflow framework?

Is there a standard way to make these specific placeholders work in the Email ID template, or is there a recommended method to inject a dynamic table into the %message% tag?

Best Regards

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Dynamics 365 Finance

Microsoft Dynamics AX

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Adis 6,597 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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Hey,

Unfortunately, the email body (template) is very limited. One way to meet your requirement is to use Power automate (PA) to send emails. You are quite flexible with PA and dont need a code release in case you change something - at least when it comes to the email part.

Now the question is how to get the data from F&O to PA. Either by a dataverse connection using virtual enties, which is the most flexible way. You need to establish a dataverse connection and create the flow, no code release. However, you need to check if the virtual entities does support all the tables you need to access.

Another method is creating business events, which sends data to PA which you can pick up and create an email out of it. This approach gives you more control as you can develop whatever you need, however, if you miss something or requirements change, you need a code release.

A third option worth mentioning and investigating is to use ISV solutions. I know that Free Edition - Docentric AX offers a lot in the free edition, especially when it comes to email templates. I am not making advertising here, just want to add a solution (approach).

Kind regards, Adis

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Diego Mancassola 768 on at

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Agree with Adis, in addition i suggest you to use standard business events.

If you check in the business events list you can find action related to each workflow in the system you have create. You can use these to integrate a Power Automate and build a custom mail body as suggested, reading data from FO using simply ODATA.

You can complex as you want if your requirements needs a custom scenario.

Check it out on catalog.

Here an official blog post about: https://community.dynamics.com/blogs/post/?postid=afab7ad0-625b-f011-bec1-7c1e52649b7e

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Anton Venter 20,656 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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Hi,

I would like to share my experience from past development adventures, perhaps it's helpful.

There are some standard placeholders for sending emails from F&O using templates but when those are not enough and you need more, you could add your own placeholders with a X++ code customization.

Have a look at sendMail method of the SysEmailTable, or SysEmailSysTable. One of the arguments in this method is a Map object for the placeholders or "mappings". You could add your mappings when this method is called. You will have to add those customer placeholders in your email template as well.

To create a HTML table with dynamic rows.

In the email body, you could use XSLT template (instead of pure HTML) to create a dynamic table. See, the SysEmailSysTable send method, the system does a transformation depending on the template type passing it XML data and the XSLT template. The XML data must also contain the required data. In my case, sales order data.

XSLT email template header (incomplete). This type of template can be used instead of regular HTML.

With a XSLT for-each statement, the transformation will use the XML data and create dynamic HTML table rows.

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