1. Customizing Alma Letters & Notices
(Because sometimes you need to tell people about the cannibals) Lori Hilterbrand
Headhunter Trophy, cliff1066 flickr CC2.0

2. What you’ll need to do the work
Role – Letter Administrator
Notepad++ or the like
Coffee

3. What I’ll need to do the work:
All of these links
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4. How to get started
Think of your need first, then go looking for how to make it happen using the XML (data that the letter draws from) to see what fields are available, and the XSL (the code that formats the letter) to make it look how you want it to
You can choose content changes using several key qualifications such as equals, contains, starts with, etc.
You may also be able to use the simple preset lines of each letter (we’ll see examples of this as well).
Stack Overflow XSLT gives good advice but always test!

6. Where to go:

7. Let’s work with the title on this one:
<xsl:if test="contains(notification_data/items/item_loan/physical_item/title , 'Cannibalism')"><b>I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti.</b>
</xsl:if>

9. <xsl:if test="contains(notification_data/items/item_loan/physical_item/title , 'Cannibalism')"><b>I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti.</b>
</xsl:if>
Things to keep in mind:
“Cannibal Cousins” didn’t work – guess why not
“The Ethnography of cannibalism” didn’t work either – guess why not
If the cannibalism book was not the 1st book in the list, it wouldn’t work – guess why not?
We can work with the title, because that field is available in the XML (the data that can get fed into the letter).
Also available from the XML for item information are author, location (both permanent and temporary), call number, barcode and much more!

10. And Item Policy!
Maybe this would be more useful: <xsl:if test="notification_data/items/item_loan/physical_item/ item_policy='52'"><b>Before returning your game, please check that all pieces are present.</b> </xsl:if>

12. Different Libraries? Different emails?
Contact Us link in the footer template
Closing – Best Wishes
<table> /td></tr> <tr><td><xsl:value-of select="notification_data/organiza tion_unit/name" /></td></tr> </table>

13. User Notification Job

14. I needed a way to notify a select group of users (in this case Doctoral candidates) that we had research rooms available.
I found a job to notify users but it only offered Password Change or Social Login notifications.
Time to bend it to our will!

15. Creating another notification!
User management configuration menu > general > user notification types
Add Row!

16. Let’s go see if it worked
Let’s go see if it worked! Manage Jobs and Sets > Run a job > Update/Notify Users

17. Here is the letter that job triggers
Here is the letter that job triggers. You can see that lines 1 and 2 are set up for the password change.
But we have lines 3 through 20 to play with!
And that Dear Sir/Madam has GOT to go!

18. How it looks out of the box

19. Adding the to/from and personalized “Dear”
Last year’s presentation “Dear Patron Moynihan” details how to change the senderReceiver and mailReason templates. Let me know if you need help!

20. Create a set of users who should receive the notice
Creating user sets is super- challenging in Alma since there are so few filters available.
Analytics will work well for a set based on user group (for instance all Doctoral candidates)
Export to excel or csv and rename column a USERNAME so it can be ingested by Alma correctly

21. Once you’ve uploaded your set, add some text to the preset lines in the letter

22. And here’s where the magic starts:
Below this
Add this by copying the code and editing the notification type and line numbers!

23. You can add those fancy italics by using an <I>
And if you’re really adventurous you can add some color using <font color=“blue”> or such

24. <h3>@@Line_7@@</h3>
Questions?