Laravel: Dynamic email content on API - php

Question

I am building an email API on Laravel. I want to send emails via this API on my other projects. I send emails successfully through this API. However, the email content is hardcoded on the client side. For example:
$body = "Dear $user->name,<br />
Thank you for your order.";
$client->request('POST', 'http://api.test/send_mail?token=' . $token, ['form_params' => [
'from' => 'client#test.com',
'title' => 'API Test Mail',
'to' => 'customer#test.com',
'body' => $body,
'signature' => 'Regards'
]]);
My aim is especially creating dynamic email body without hardcoded. So, I save email content to the database. My plan is to trigger the saved email content with request on the client side. After some researches on email systems with similar structures, I think, I have to save the related content to the database like this format:
Dear {{ username }}
Thank you for your order.
By this way, I will only send the username info to the API from the client side. I will not have to deal with HTML email content.
However, I am not sure about what to do after this stage. How can I send and parse the $username info to the API from the client side? Do I have to add request to the API on every single parameters? Here is my current request rules:
return [
'title' => 'required',
'from' => 'required|email',
'to' => 'required|email',
'body' => 'required',
'signature' => 'nullable',
'email_template' => 'nullable'
];
Also this is my mail markdown:
#component('mail::message')
{!! $mail['body'] !!}
#if(array_key_exists('signature', $mail))
<p>{!! $mail['signature'] !!}</p>
#endif
#endcomponent
Actually, dynamic parameters will be child members of the body. If I want to add $username as a dynamic variable to the email body, should I add it to the rules of the request and also to the mail markdown? If so, I have to do some static transactions on every saved different email contents and their different parameters.
How can I build this structure in a clearer way?

Answer 1

Yes, You should parse every parameters to your API.
You may do like this:
$data['username'] = 'John';
$data['other'] = 'other';
$client->request('POST', 'http://api.test/send_mail?token=' . $token,
['form_params' =>
[
'from' => 'client#test.com',
'title' => 'API Test Mail',
'to' => 'customer#test.com',
'data' => $data,
'signature' => 'Regards',
'template_id' => 'template_id' // parse if you have multi templates
]]);
And you can send email like this in API controller.
public function sendEmail(Request $request)
{
$template = Template::findorfail($request->template_id);
$body = $template->body;// this is template dynamic body. You may get other parameters too from database. $title = $template->title; $from = $template->from;
foreach($request->data as $key=>$parameter)
{
$body = str_replace('{{'.$key.'}}', $parameter, $body); // this will replace {{username}} with $data['username']
}
$request->body = $body;
$mailObject = new MyMail($request); // you can make php artisan make:mail MyMail
Mail::to($request->to)->send($mailObject);
}
...
class MyMail extends Mailable
{
use Queueable, SerializesModels;
public $request;
public function __construct($request)
{
$this->request= $request;
}
public function build()
{
return $this->subject($this->request['title'])
->from($this->request['from'])
->markdown('components.mail.myTemplate');
}
}
Then in myTemplate.blade.php you can render {!!$request['body'] !}}
Hope this helps you.