E-mail templates are XML documents containing boilerplate and replacement tokens. E-mail templates are used to generate e-mail message body text. See Templates for general information about templates.
The replacement tokens used in an e-mail template dictate the <item> elements that must be supplied as children of the <replacement-data> element that is constructed by the Subscriber channel policy that constructs the <mail> element. For example, if the e-mail template has the replacement token $employee-name$, there must be an <item name=“employee-name”> element in the replacement data for the <message> element. If the employee name item is not present, the resulting e-mail message body has no text in the location occupied by the replacement token in the template.
E-mail templates can be used to generate message bodies that are plain text, HTML, or XML.
If an e-mail template generates a plain text message, it must be processed by a style sheet that specifies plain text as its output type. If the style sheet does not specify plain text as its output type, undesirable XML escaping occurs. The default Manual Task Service driver style sheet, process_text_template.xsl, is normally used for processing templates that result in plain text.