1.4

Write your own scripts
Personalization can be taken a lot further than just inserting names and addresses, and hiding
or showing text or images. Every bit of information in your communications can be made
entirely personal, using scripts.
Most scripts can be made using one of the script Wizards. For a block of variable data, such as
an address, the Text Script Wizard is a perfect fit. Paragraphs can be made conditional with a
Conditional Script Wizard. For dynamic images, you can use the Dynamic Image Script Wizard.
In an Email context, you are provided with a number of script Wizards to set the sender, the
recipients and the subject of the email.
However, when you want to do something that goes beyond what you can do with a Wizard,
like creating a conditional paragraph with a condition that is based on a combination of data
fields, you have to write the script yourself.
This topic explains how scripts work and how you can create and write a script.
How scripts work
A script is a small set of instructions to the program, written in JavaScript.
When Connect generates the actual output – letters, web pages or emails -, it opens a record
set and merges it with the template. It takes each record, one by one, and runs all scripts for it
(Control Scripts first).
All scripts, except Control Scripts, must have a selector. The selector can be text, an HTML
element and/or a CSS selector. Running a script starts with looking for pieces of content in the
template that match the script's selector.
The results of this query can vary from one occurrence of a simple text (for example:
@EMAIL@) to a large collection of HTML elements. For example, when the selector is p, the
HTML tag for a paragraph, all paragraphs will be collected and passed to the script.
Tip
Hover over the name of a script in the Scripts pane to see which parts of the template are affected
by the script.
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