Cascading Dynamic Content

In JungleMail for Office 365, you can use one piece of Dynamic Content inside another one. This feature can be very useful in creating newsletters with content that needs to be grouped internally by some criteria (e.g., news topics).

Configuration

In the tutorial below, we will show you how to configure JungleMail to display news posts grouped by category. To do this, we will create a Dynamic Block inside a Dynamic Section. In this configuration, the Dynamic Section will repeat the news categories, while the Dynamic Block inside it will repeat the items (news posts) for each category.

1. Create a Dynamic Section

1. Select an empty section in the template.

2. In the Dynamic tab on the right, turn on the Enable SharePoint content toggle. Then, select Dynamic as a content extraction method.

3. In the pop-up window, browse to the SharePoint list containing your news topics. In the example, we're using the Topics list.

Here's the list specified in section settings:

Now we're going to configure blocks in the Dynamic Section so that they automatically pull metadata from the Topics list. Again, we're going to use Dynamic Content here.

4. Drag and drop the Title and Text blocks in the Dynamic Section.

5. Select the Title block, remove the sample text and select the { Columns } button. 6. In the list of available columns that are derived from the list specified in the Dynamic Section, select the column that you want to use in the Title block and click Insert.

2. Configure Dynamic Block inside Dynamic Section

Now that we have set up the Dynamic Section to display news categories, it is time to create a Dynamic Block inside this section to display news posts for each category.

1. Select the Text block. 2. In the Dynamic tab, turn on the Enable SharePoint content toggle. Select Dynamic as the content extraction method. In the pop-up window, select the SharePoint list with content you want to use in the block. In the example, we're using the SitePages list that contains the news posts.

3. Now, we have to configure the Dynamic Block so that the news it pulls from the list is grouped under the right news topic. This is done by adding conditions. In the example, JMTopics is the column in the SitePages list (Dynamic Block), whereas Title is the column in the Topics list (Dynamic Section). Both columns contain the same category titles but on separate lists. Note the parent column value which points to the column in the Dynamic Section.

4. In the Dynamic Block (the Text block), add the placeholders pointing to the content you want to be displayed in your newsletter. To select the columns, use the {Columns & Links} button. Note that you can change the formatting of placeholders; the imported metadata will be formatted accordingly.

In the example, we've added a picture, the title of the news post, and the comments.

Note: the formula in the Dynamic Section differs from that in the Dynamic Block. You can see the difference in the letters:

• {S:[Title]} - pulls the Title column value from the Dynamic Section list
• {B:[Title]} - pulls the Title column value from the Dynamic Block list
• {[Title]} - pulls the Title column value from the Recipient list

3. Preview results

To preview the newsletter with loaded metadata, go to the Preview step.

In our example, the result of a Dynamic Block inside a Dynamic Section looks like this:

You can also opt to process Dynamic Content directly in the template. To do this, select the Dynamic Section and click on the round arrows button.

With metadata loaded, you can edit it further (e.g., move the section, change text formatting etc.) Note, however, that after processing Dynamic Content, the Dynamic Section becomes a regular (static) section again. If you intend to reuse the template with Dynamic Content configuration later, save the template before processing (you can also use the Undo button to roll back the processing).