Send email to multiple recipients via mail connector

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1

Dear Community,

I am using mail connector https://github.com/camunda/camunda-bpm-mail to send Mails. For one recipient it is working fine. However, I need to send the mail to multiple recipients.

First I tried to pass a java.util.List as Input Parameter “to”. This throws an Exception as a String is expected. I could solve it by converting the Mail Activity to a Sequential Multi Instance Activity. This works works, though it is not exactly, what I wanted. In this case for each recipient a separate mail is sent whereas I want camunda to send one mail with multiple recipients.

Any hint will be appreciated.

2

Looking at the underlying implementation, the to, cc and bcc fields should all take a list of email addresses separated by commas. You should be able to take your java.util.List and turn it into string of addresses delimited by commas.

3

Hi @jgigliotti,
I have a similar issue . I am getting the list of email addresses from a decision table (using collect policy). I am trying to use the output variable from the table in the “to” field of the mail connector . Tried the following :

  1. Use String Expression in the “to” field and variable #{approver} [which is the output variable from the decision table, and is a list] and rightly gave me a ClassCastException

java.lang.ClassCastException: class java.util.ArrayList cannot be cast to class java.lang.String (java.util.ArrayList and java.lang.String are in module java.base of loader ‘bootstrap’)

at org.camunda.bpm.extension.mail.send.SendMailRequest.getTo(SendMailRequest.java:51)
2) Use List as the variable assignment type in the “To” field and provide #{approver} . It throws the same exception as above. the getTo() method of SendMailRequest is expected to return a String.

Is there a way to get around this or am I using the incorrect assignments?

Thank you
Romasha

4

Yes, like I mentioned above, you need to pass it a string composed of email addresses separated by commas, e.g.:

“email1@example.com, email2@example.com, email3@example.com”

5

Decision table outputs do not take a comma separated string .
DMN-01002 Unable to evaluate expression for language ‘juel’: ‘${“test1.test@abc.com”, “abc.def@abc.com”}’
So the alternative is to define rows for each person eligible to get that email , for a certain input , then use a collect policy and have it as a list but it does not work , when using the variable in the connector as a value for “To”. Though there is a “List” option in the connector for “To” but eventually it fails later.

Decision output not taking a comma separated list . Is that expected behavior ? My other option is to use a single distribution list instead of specific email addresses as a list or comma separated.

6

Sounds like you’re conflating two things. Instead of mapping the DMN output directly to the To field of the email connector, can you transpose the data in a delegate before feeding it into the email task? Before you do anything though, test it out and verify the string of comma separated email addresses works. I haven’t done so, I was merely looking at the extension’s source.

7

@romashatomar from the dmn output (list of email address) construct the string value separated by comma for each values in the list.

For example:

DMN result: [“a@a.com”, “b@b.com”]

into

“a@a.com”, “b@b.com”

will work.

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