Visualforce Email Templates

Hello, dear readers.  I have been busy and haven't updated this blog in a while but I came across a couple unusual behaviors that are not well documented.  In fact, one of the behaviors led to my support rep getting a knowledge article published.  The topic for today is visualforce email templates and some things to think about if you are using them.  Trust me, none of this is documented and even though Salesforce says "working as designed", I think you may want to look at your solution carefully.

Imagine Joe Q. Salesperson lands a sweet client one Friday morning, creates an opportunity, generates a quote and sends that quote to his boss for approval.  Joe spends the weekend relaxing the afternoon away and the next day still hasn't gotten approval from his boss.  Joe calls the boss and finds out he never got the email alert that something required his approval.  Well, that's strange because Joe never saw an error and the quote was submitted for approval (he can see it in Salesforce). Furthermore, after his boss approved the email, the status in the email alert still said "Pending".  What was going on?  Joe calls IT and is severely irritated because he couldn't close the deal before the weekend and was seeing data in the email that didn't match what was in Salesforce.

So what is it with VF email templates?

Email Alerts with Visualforce Templates Do Not Always Send (and will not throw error)
Let that sink in for a minute - your trusty email alerts, even when the rule or approval process triggers the alert do not always send the email.  And when they don't send, there isn't an error generated.  Not even in the logs.

According to Salesforce, this is working as designed because Joe's administrator put a field on the VF email template that Joe did not have read-access to.  Support was kind enough to generate some documentation of this behavior for us, after the fact.  It should be noted that if your VF template uses a controller, your users will see an error if you don't give them access to the controller.  It seems to me that the expected behavior here is that field level security should be applied.  If the user has access to the field, display it, otherwise, hide it.  Unfortunately that is not the case.


Email Alerts with Visualforce Templates Do Not Always Get the Latest Field Values
If you have an approval process with an action that performs a field update and sends an email alert, the email will not have the field update value if the template is a VF template.  But, wait Salesforce's documentation says

• Field updates occur before email alerts, tasks, and outbound messages

It is the first bullet in the Field Update considerations.  Except, it doesn't apply when it comes to VF templates.  Again, support says it is working as designed.  If you have a text or html template, the value from the field update is represented in the email, however, this is not the case with a VF template.