Anyone out there using Velocity Scripting? Reactions?

[Matthew_Gomez1]

We're encountering issues with flattening data on our Contact record in Salesforce to make it usable for Marketo, and we're evaluating Velocity scripting as a possible solution. Any reactions? Is it as simple as it sounds? I don't have a Java background but if pointing to fields on custom objects to make them available as tokens in emails is as straightforward as it sounds, I think I can manage.

[Josh_Hill13]

Try this

Basic Email Scripting Examples for Marketers

[Anonymous]

Hi Matthew,

I used Velocity scripting extensively for a custom work involving one lead to many custom object (denoting the products he/she bought). There are some gotchas but it works pretty well otherwise.

If you know java, the script syntax will look very familiar to you. Though I doubt you will be doing too much of complex looping and object oriented programming in velocity scripts. For my work, I looped through the custom object, printed out records with some html formating to look good on the email and so on.

I am assuming that you are looking to use velocity script to merge data from custom object in your emails etc. The question you also want to consider is how are you populating this custom object data. Is it coming from SFDC or API calls?

If you have any questions, please feel freel to reach out.

Hope this helps

Rajesh Talele

[Kenny_Elkington]

Depending on your specific use case it can be either extremely simple or extremely complex.  What kind of formatting are you trying to do?

[Neil_Robertson6]

We use it extensively as well.   As noted by others - it has some gotchas and indeed in some cases some of the packages which are normally available via VTL are disabled so you can't do things such as sorting data which may be a downside for you if you want to output data pro grammatically via iteration.