Can We Truncate Subscription Email Post Body?

I'll be honest I haven't worked on email templates, we had an agency overhaul them for various reasons. There is however a truncate option for Freemarker I've used in a number of components. If the body is added in as a ${} variable it might work.

Built-ins for strings - Apache FreeMarker Manual

Interesting.  I was under the (probably false) impression that the email templates weren't actually Freemarker.  Whelp, maybe I should give it a try.... 

We hired a Khoros partner to rebuild 1 of the emails, and they stated truncating wasn't a possibility.  I'll try and report back in a few mins. 

Update:  I'm chickening out.  

From what I've gathered in the past 30 mins....

• This seems impossible.
• ?truncate(16) doesn't work.  (rec'd below error when sending test email... then when triggering an actual email, the email was never sent/received.)
• Email templates don't use FreeMarker; they use Apache Velocity.  While the documentation below the email editor says this, I didn't read it. 
• Adobe's Marketo community gave me hope with .truncate: 

$display.truncate($id,15,"")

• But, it was in vain, as any combination of 

${display.truncate($notification.HTMLBody,15)}​

or

$display.truncate($notification.HTMLBody,15)​

• just showed that exact string in the email, like
    
• While perhaps I'm formatting it wrong, I'm losing hope and need to move on to other things.  

If anybody knows Velocity and can verify if this is possible or not, please chime in!

PS:  Here's the error I received when trying ?truncate(16) & clicking the "Send email to self" button.

Hi Keith, as you discovered, the "?truncate" syntax is for Apache FreeMarker, while email templates utilize Apache Velocity 1.5. In the Marketo community thread, they referred to a couple of variables:

• $String: They were using this to refer to a StringUtils object.
• $display: They were using this to refer to a DisplayTool object (from Velocity Tools)

Using utilities/tools like these would require that they have been placed on the context by the environment (the community application). Unfortunately Khoros does not provide access to these or other utilities.

So you would need to find a way to do this yourself using conditional logic and the methods provided on the String itself. Here is the source code for those two utilities, which you could try to emulate:

• chop from StringUtils @ Velocity 1.5 
• truncate from DisplayTool @ Velocity Tools 3.2 

Broadly, any implementation would need to use the "length" method (to determine whether to truncate) and then conditionally use the "substring" method, plus some concatenation.

Apologies forgot it was Velocity. Wonder how the Aurora emails are generated, hopefully something a bit more straightforward.

We went down the route of not including the body text by default for similar reasons. It's easy enough for power users to enable it again. 

We tried this a few years back and eventually gave up because none of the functions we were expecting to be available to us would work.

Emails are one area where I’m REALLY looking forward to Aurora!