Embedding images in E-Mail

We have been using XML XSL transformation for generating the emails and it was working well . XML Provides the data and Styling is provided in XSL . It becomes tricky when including images . One easy way to do is to include images as URL . This may not be the right approach as the user may not be online when looking a the email and can be lost during forwarding .

Best way is to use javax.mail.internet.MimeMultipart and set the images as header .
Here is the example
XSL to include images will look like this

<img>

<xsl:attribute name="src">cid:image1</xsl:attribute>

<xsl:attribute name="border">0</xsl:attribute>

</img>

Include the images in the email service after the transformation

MimeMultipart multipart = new MimeMultipart();

BodyPart messageBodyPart = new MimeBodyPart();



messageBodyPart.setContent("All Email contents from Transformation", "text/html");

multipart.addBodyPart(messageBodyPart);



// add first image

messageBodyPart = new MimeBodyPart();

DataSource fds = new FileDataSource

("C:\\image_path");

messageBodyPart.setHeader("Content-ID","<image1>");

messageBodyPart.setDataHandler(new DataHandler(fds));

multipart.addBodyPart(messageBodyPart);



//add another image

messageBodyPart = new MimeBodyPart();

DataSource fds1 = new FileDataSource

("C:\\image-path");

messageBodyPart.setHeader("Content-ID","<image2>");

messageBodyPart.setDataHandler(new DataHandler(fds1));

multipart.addBodyPart(messageBodyPart);



message.setContent(multipart);

You will see the image replaced .Images are downloaded with the message and is replaced where the tag is used . It's solves all the issues related to using them as URL.