Create a text-only email programmatically in Marketing Cloud

Question

Hi Marketing Cloud gurus,

Does anyone know how to create a text-only email programmatically? I am building an application in a Cloudpage (so users don't have to login into SFMC and the initial step is a "setup" process that:

1. creates a Data Extension
2. creates a personalised text-only email (very simple, only 2 sentences)
3. creates the associated Triggered Send definition.

I am ok with 1 and 3, but I have no idea how to do 2.

Thank you

Answer 1

are you familiar with Content Builder API?

https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/marketing/marketing-cloud/guide/content-api.html

textonlyemail is asset type 209:

https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/marketing/marketing-cloud/guide/base-asset-types.html

... and here is a piece of sample code for the full call (actually - here is an entire library of samples: https://www.postman.com/salesforce-developers/workspace/salesforce-developers/request/14448118-f6c3c300-c990-4943-8cfc-15a622c2b34e )

==

If you have that, all you need to do is get an access token and send that via a HTTP POST from your SSJS.

Here is a good example of an http POST request in SSJS: SSJS HTTP.Post throws error instead of returning status code

Full request:

From the linked example, towards the bottom I changed "htmlemail" to "textonlyemail" and 208 to 209.

Then I removed the html content, inserted text content.

POST https://{{subdomain}}.rest.marketingcloudapis.com/asset/v1/content/assets

{
    "name": "Postman Demo - txt Email",
    "channels": {
        "email": true,
        "web": false
    },
    "views": {
        "html": {
        },
        "text": {
            "content": "text"
        },
        "subjectline": {
            "content": "%%First_Name%% this is my subject line"
        },
        "preheader": {
            "content": "and this is my preheader"
        }
    },
    "assetType": {
        "name": "textonlyemail",
        "id": 209
    }
}

Result:

And the content:

Answer 2

Finally found out that it's possible to use WS proxy. However, the email will get created into Classic Content

https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/marketing/marketing-cloud/guide/email.html

var prox = new Script.Util.WSProxy();
var configEmail = {
    "CustomerKey": String(Platform.Function.GUID()).toUpperCase(),
    "Name": "txtemail_prox",
    "Subject": "Email created with wsproxy",
    "TextBody": "Hi %%firstname%%, this is the text email",
    "EmailType": "Text Only",
    "IsHTMLPaste": true
}

try {
    var email = prox.createItem("Email", configEmail);
    Write('Response' + Stringify(email));
} catch (error) {
    Write('Message' + error)
}