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BI Dashboard as email

Open kha84 opened this issue 10 months ago • 4 comments

Hello guys!

I really love your main idea behind of Evidence, but recently I realized that in some cases business users need even more simple solution than a web BI. Even if it's a lightning fast and easy to use web BI, which is also very friendly to its developers.

The alternative I was thinking of is a newspaper-like approach. Imagine business gets an email early in the morning, before the day begins, with all the fancy charts and rest stuff - exactly as they would have seen it, if they went to a static website, generated by Evidence, just probably without interactive javascript-powered part.

I was thinking how to approach this, with using Evidence as a base, given Evidence doesn't provide this feature out-of-the-box (or does it?). My first idea was to use some 3rd party tools or libraries to save the HTML from evidence website and inject it into HTML email, and I'm gonna try exactly this. But I have some doubts regarding extra resources, that HTML might be using - like separate css, js, image files, whatever. Not sure if email client applications will be nice to me, while rendering all that :)

If anyone has any ideas or probably already implemented something like this, I'll be grateful to hear from you.

kha84 avatar Feb 11 '25 06:02 kha84

+1 – This feature would be incredibly valuable. It's exactly what I've been looking for, especially when working with templated pages. Additionally, it would be even more useful if there were options to customize the email output—such as inlining CSS and bundling assets—to ensure consistent rendering across different email clients. Perhaps even a scheduling feature to automate sending these dashboards on a regular basis would further enhance its utility for business users

vchigne avatar Feb 13 '25 22:02 vchigne

What about html to pdf and sent it as an attachment? This will be the easiest option to keep the exact formatting. (Outlook doesn't really like html formatting.)

PowerPlop avatar Feb 14 '25 09:02 PowerPlop

What about html to pdf and sent it as an attachment? This will be the easiest option to keep the exact formatting. (Outlook doesn't really like html formatting.)

It will work too

vchigne avatar Feb 14 '25 13:02 vchigne

Agree this is a great feature.

Some workarounds in the meantime:

  • Generate PDF: https://gist.github.com/archiewood/ec67d2f693a5d0b39fd642c1719005a9
  • Send Email: https://gist.github.com/archiewood/1dae21aca89219b456e3393334edf554

If you add these scripts to your package.json scripts eg "generate": "node generate-pdf.js"

Then you could add these with some kind of scheduler like GH actions

archiewood avatar Feb 27 '25 06:02 archiewood