I added some code to a customer’s system to set a default email template (signature). This code is avaiable from various places through Google. However, there were some strange inconsitencies when we added it to their live system – in some cases the signature would load, sometimes it wouldn’t.

Eventually I figured out that sometimes Microsoft’s own onLoad code was removing the signature I had set. Basically it was doing a query to find any email body (because the same form / code is used when looking at email history) and when it found none it was overwriting the email body (along with my signature).

In-fact, it was setting the body to something like…

I added a StripHTML function and a 500msec delay to my code (plus a bunch of additional null checks) which seems to have solved the problem.

Here’s the code for the onLoad of the email form. If you want to use it, don’t forget to change the GUID on line 7 for your specific template.

function sig() {

  if (crmForm.FormType != 1) {return;}

  // Pre-fill a template signature
  var drawSignature = false;
  var emailTemplateToLoad = "D802E626-4DB1-E011-81DD-0015C5FF4D30";   // sandbox "BAA8272F-F7AD-E011-93CB-0015C5FF4CDB"

  // Check if description is blank or similar
  var theDescription = crmForm.all.description.DataValue;
  if (theDescription == null) {
    drawSignature = true;
  } else if (theDescription == undefined) {
    drawSignature = true;
  } else if (stripHTML(theDescription) == "") {
    drawSignature = true;
  } else if (stripHTML(theDescription).length < 10) {
    drawSignature = true;
  }

  if (drawSignature) {

    // Get Regarding object details
    if (!crmForm.all.regardingobjectid) {return;}
    var RegardingItems = crmForm.all.regardingobjectid.DataValue;

    if (RegardingItems) {

      var regardingObjectId = RegardingItems[0].id;
      var regardingObjectType = RegardingItems[0].type;

      if (regardingObjectId == null || regardingObjectId == "") {return;}
      if (regardingObjectType == null || regardingObjectType == "") {return;}

      var command = new RemoteCommand("EmailTemplateService", "GetInstantiatedEmailTemplate");
      command.SetParameter("templateId", emailTemplateToLoad );
      command.SetParameter("objectId", regardingObjectId);
      command.SetParameter("objectTypeCode", regardingObjectType);
      var result = command.Execute();

      if (result.Success) {
        var o = new Object();
        o.EmailBody = "";
        o.EmailSubject = "";
        if(typeof(result.ReturnValue) == "string") {
          oXml = CreateXmlDocument(false);
          oXml.loadXML(result.ReturnValue);
          o.EmailBody = oXml.selectSingleNode("template/body").text;
          o.EmailSubject = oXml.selectSingleNode("template/subject").text;
          crmForm.all.description.InsertValue(o.EmailBody);
        }
      }

    }

  } // drawSignature == true

}

function stripHTML(xx) {
  var tmp = document.createElement("DIV");
  tmp.innerHTML = xx;
  return tmp.textContent||tmp.innerText;
}

var a = window.setTimeout(sig, 500);