Accessing external data with Velocity

[Anonymous]

Hi there,

I'm not familiar with Velocity in detail, so I hope someone with more expertise can help me out here.

We want to be able pull data from a website that's not related to leads, but needs to be up to date when the email is sent. I'd like this to be done along with the email creation, as opposed to pushing this data through to every lead as an extra field (which is messy to say the least).

Programmatically, I can easily see how this works. I'm just not sure how to pull it off in Velocity, and if that's even enabled in the way Marketo has implimented Velocity.

Thanks!

[Anonymous]

If I am following the idea correctly you will need to resource to webhooks to access the external data first and then use Velocity to display that data.

[Anonymous]

Thanks, but what I'm trying to avoid is pulling data into lead fields, which is what a webhook would do. I want a programmatic solution, and I'm hoping email scripting can do it.

[Brice_Dunwoodie]

I need the same thing. We need a way to bring in a list of content that is updated daily and display that in our emails.

[Anonymous]

It does not necesarily requires a database field. It can be a program token such as {{my.something}}.
That token is added to the email.

The script would retrieve the intended values and populate the token. It could be as simple as a single value or a large table.

[Brice_Dunwoodie]

Hi Breno,

You say:
"The script would retrieve the intended values and populate the token."

What I'm not understanding is how a script in a Marketo script token would pull in data from an external data source.

Can you shed light there?

-Brice

[Anonymous]

I am also looking for exactly similar thing. Any help would be much appreciated.

- Faheem

[Anonymous]

Same question here. Any news on that topic?

[Grégoire_Miche2]

There a couple of ways to do this :

• Through program tokens
• Through custom objects

Both can now be set using the Rest API, but not from the Velocity script.

-Greg

[Anonymous]

Thanks Grégoire for your reply.

What I would like to do to have an API to retrieve data from Google docs which will be pushed into a program token. I guess this is not possible?

Thanks in advance

Jörg