Does SendGrid template engine have conditionals? - sendgrid

Question

Sending transactional apis through SendGrid. My template (ported over from Mailchimp) has conditionals (e.g.
*|IF:SHOWTHISSECTION|*
in Mailchimp syntax). This includes or excludes sections of the template based on a variable.
I can't find the analog in SendGrid, does it simply not have this capability? I'd like to suppress certain sections depending on the presence/absence of a substitution variable.

Answer 1

SendGrid supports this natively now:
{{#if user.profile.male}}
<p>Dear Sir</p>
{{else if user.profile.female}}
<p>Dear Madame</p>
{{else}}
<p> Dear Customer</p>
{{/if}}
Reference: https://sendgrid.com/docs/for-developers/sending-email/using-handlebars/#conditional-statements

Answer 2

It's a horrible hack, but by introducing new variables and using CSS, you can hide the relevant portions of mails using display. So where before in Mandrill/MailChimp I'd have something like:
*|IF:FAKEVAR|*
<p>Show some text here</p>
*|END:IF|*
Instead, introduce a new variable IF_FAKEVAR, whose value is either "none" or "inherit" depending on whether FAKEVAR has a value, then do this:
<p style="display: *|IF_FAKEVAR|*">Show some text here</p>
While it's a hack, for very complex email templates, it avoids sending 70k bytes to the server for every single email, which when you have thousands or tens of thousands of mails, is prohibitive.

Answer 3

SendGrid templating does not support this, but you can use a templating API like sendwithus to accomplish this on top of your SendGrid account. I believe sendwithus supports jinja conditionals, so you could do the following:
{% if variable %}
<h1>{{ variable }}</h1>
{% endif %}

Answer 4

Sendgrid supports conditional using Handlebar
{{#if user.profile.male}}
<p>Dear Sir</p>
{{else if user.profile.female}}
<p>Dear Madame</p>
{{else}}
<p> Dear Customer</p>
{{/if}}
from their documentation here https://sendgrid.com/docs/for-developers/sending-email/using-handlebars/#conditional-statements

Answer 5

Below handlebars can be used in Sendgrid dynamic templates:
Conditional statements:
{{#if variable}}
{{#unless variable}}
{{#greaterThan variable value}}
{{#lessThan variable value}}
{{#equals variable value}}
{{#notEquals variable value}}
{{#and variable1 variable2}}
{{#or variable1 variable2}}
Looping statements:
{{#each hash}}
Refer https://sendgrid.com/docs/for-developers/sending-email/using-handlebars/ for detailed information

Answer 6

SendGrid doesn't have true conditionals, but it does have Section Tags. With those, you can define a block of text at the message level (as opposed to the distinct recipient level of a Substitution Tag), and then call the appropriate section for the recipient as needed.

Answer 7

I Know this is old, but I had the same problem and I found a solution compatible with several email managers that maybe it's helpful for someone.
You can use substitution tags with the html comment symbols value in case you want to hide a section.
{%OPEN_COMMENT}
<h1>Whatever section you want to hide</h1>
{%CLOSE_COMMENT}
Replace tags with "" respectively if you want to hide the section. Replace them with empty strings in the other case.