Rendering HTML (CKEditor content) in Emails

Gowtham

Question

Hi everyone,

I’m working on building a common notification framework in OutSystems Developer Cloud (ODC) and I’ve run into a challenge when rendering dynamic email content.

Scenario:

Admin users configure email templates using a Rich Text Editor (CKEditor).
The content is stored in the database as HTML.
I’ve exposed a server action in the framework that other applications can call to send email notifications.
The action receives the template and sends the email.

Problem:

When I try to use the stored HTML content as the email body, it doesn’t render as expected. Instead, it appears as plain text (HTML tags are not interpreted).
In traditional OutSystems (O11), we could rely on properties like “Escape Content = False” to render raw HTML. However, in ODC, this property is not available.

What I’m Looking For:

Is there an alternative approach in ODC to render HTML content correctly in emails?
Any recommended patterns for handling rich HTML templates stored in DB?
Are there specific APIs, widgets, or configurations that enable HTML rendering safely?

Additional Context:

The email body is dynamic and comes entirely from CKEditor.
The goal is to allow non-technical users (admins) to design email templates.

If anyone has implemented a similar solution in ODC or knows a workaround, I’d really appreciate your guidance or examples.

Thanks in advance!

Gowtham

11 Jun

Eduardo Jauch

Hello, @Gowtham

According to this post from 2024, it's not possible to do it in ODC like it was possible in Traditional.

Three workarounds:

1. Create a Traditional App to send the emails. You can make an API you call from the ODC app or if you use the O11 integration to have access to the O11 entities, you can use a small BPT in O11 to trigger the email send and add a record with the required information to an entity that triggers the email sending from ODC.

2. This may be also useful.

3. Use an external service to send the email (like suggested in the post I mentioned above).

Hope this helps.

Cheers!

11 Jun

Lokesh Kumar Yadav

In ODC, HTML content from CKEditor is usually rendered as plain text unless the email body is sent with content type text/html. Unlike O11, there is no “Escape Content = False” property. The recommended approach is to store the CKEditor HTML in DB and pass it directly as the HTML body while sending the email. Also, consider sanitizing the HTML before sending for security and formatting consistency.

11 Jun

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