We have text fields and areas displayed within our Exact Target Landing Pages which had been inserted into a Data Extension text field using AMPscript enabled landing pages. We are using the "pre" tag to hold minimal formatting but it appears that special characters and html Markups won't display as intended. I see no way to apply bold to a word, create a Bullet list or display special characters such as a (c) copyright indicia, umlauts, tilde's etc. I poked around here and haven't seen anyone address this on SO or SE. This is a pretty solid requirement for this internationally reviewed set of pages and something I'm pretty confident will have a simple solution.
We are using "upsertdata" to post the variables and update the text field in the extension from the text area on our form. I also see that if anything is entered with "inch marks" that it does cause errors on the upsertData either duplicating or changing content.
SO //(-_-)\ – Turns out in experimenting that the HTML markup WORKS as well as special characters. I feel pretty certain it had not in the past but it does(?!?) Going back to edit the text breaks it so still not perfect but this changes the question.
I think what I'll really need is to implement a CKeditor style text editor for that text field.
[SalesForce] Exact Target Data Extension and special characters – HTML markup
Related Solutions
What you are trying to do is certainly possible as I have done something similar.
IF that is your exact code, then the problem is you are missing an "@" on your variable, should read:
{... background-color: %%=v(@clientColorPref)=%%; ...}
The way to do it would be:
Create an ampscript block at the top of the page.
Do your DE lookup.
Set your AMPscript variable to the desired field.
Use the "v()" operation in your actual script.
Hope this helps.
This is referring to a field in the coupon data extension, and the value you would like to populate it with. You can populate extra fields in the coupon data extension so that you can reference information about who claimed the coupon. The example on ET's help docs uses JobID, ListID, BatchID, SubscriberID, EmailAddress and ClaimedDate.
The reason you are getting an error because you are trying to insert the value of the attribute newsletter_coupon_20_key into the field newsletter_coupon_20_key in the data extension newsletter_coupon_20. This attribute either does not exist in your profile attributes, or in the Sendable DE you are attempting to deploy to, or the field "newsletter_coupon_20_key" does not exist in the coupon DE.
If you want the bare minimum for claiming a row, you could simply write:
SET @CouponRow = ClaimRow("newsletter_coupon_20", "IsClaimed")
However I do not recommend this approach because you are left with almost no information on who claimed the coupon or when that happened.
My suggestion is to set up the coupon DE using ET's example specification, which looks like this:
Then, the code to claim a row would look like this:
set @CouponRow = ClaimRow("newsletter_coupon_20", "IsClaimed", "JobID", JobID, "ListID", ListID, "BatchID", _JobSubscriberBatchID, "SubscriberID", SubscriberID,"EmailAddress",EmailAddress)
(Notice the correlation between the DE fields, and the name/value pairs in the function)
You may also wish to add additional fields to the coupon DE. For instance you may want to add a "CampaignName" field, and populate it with the friendly name "Newsletter". Adding that would look something like this:
set @CouponRow = ClaimRow("newsletter_coupon_20", "IsClaimed", "CampaignName", "Newsletter")
Note that "Newsletter" is a string, not a variable, which is why it is in quotes.
Best Answer
Are you adding them via .csv? If the encoding of the file that is storing the information is Unicode (or whatever encoding is needed) the Data Extension should accept it correctly since you said they are set to a field type of 'text.'