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Previewing Templates with Data

After you've created a template and personalized it with user profile fields, data feeds, and Catalog data, preview it with user data before sending it out. This will help you find and fix mistakes, and give you confidence that the message will look good to all of your users.

In this article

To preview a template with user data, follow the steps outlined here:

Step 1: Navigate to the Preview page

To get to the Preview page for a template:

  1. Go to Content > Templates, find the overflow menu (three dots), and choose Preview with data.

    The Preview with data option on the overflow menu

  2. Or, open a template and click Preview.

    The Preview option for an open template

To preview a campaign's content with user data, open the campaign, click Edit design (email and in-app templates only), and click Preview.

NOTES

  • Before previewing a template, save any changes you've made. Otherwise, they won't show up in the preview.
  • Be sure to preview your email templates on devices and email clients, too.

Step 2: Load data for a user

On the Preview page, you can load data for a specific user to see how it affects the template. To do this:

  1. Enter a user's email address and click Load user data. That user's profile data appears, and the template preview updates to reflect it. If the preview doesn't refresh properly, click the refresh button by the previewer.

    Projects that use userId as a unique identifier can also use this field to load data for a user (userID-based projects and hybrid projects only). Read Project Types and Unique Identifiers to learn more.

  2. To see how different user profile values affect the template, you can load data for different users, or you can manually edit the loaded data to reflect a particular scenario. This won't change the user's actual Iterable profile —  it's just a way to experiment.

  3. To clear the loaded user data, click Clear user data.

    Preview template with user data

Step 3: Enter data feeds

If your template uses data feeds, you can use the Preview page to load them and make sure your template uses them correctly. To do this:

  1. Load the data feeds that you've associated with your template (in its Details area) by clicking Load data feeds.

  2. Experiment with different data feed data by editing the returned data however you'd like. Your changes won't affect the data feed or your template.

  3. If the data feeds required by your templates use aliases, they're listed with its data. For example, this data feed has alias my_alias:

    Data feed data with alias

  4. To clear any loaded data feed data, click Clear data feeds.

TIP

If the previewer doesn't update as you expect, try clicking the refresh button.

For SMS templates that use link shortening, the Preview page shows example shortened links, but they're not the actual links that will be sent to your users. The placeholders exist to give you a better sense of what the message will ultimately look like, and of its actual character count.

Previewing a JSON payload

When you add a JSON payload to your push or in-app templates, you may want to check that any Handlebars or snippets in the payload are configured properly. To do this, use the Raw data (JSON) preview area on the Preview page. This preview shows the data that Iterable will pass to your app.

To access the raw data preview, open your push or in-app template, click Preview, and scroll to the bottom of the page.

Raw data JSON preview

NOTE

For raw JSON data that includes Handlebars expressions (like {{firstName}}), be sure to load (or enter) user data on the Preview page. This allows you to see what the final raw JSON values will be for different combinations of user data.

Further reading

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