How to set character limit in email template

By default I have set my Dolphin my dolphin messaging notification to send the message text to the user's email.

This has a few advantages (users do not have to login to the website to see the message and this reduces load on the website) and a few disadvantages (even though I have included a great big message in red not to - users forget that they have to login to reply and try to reply to the message using their email).

I am trying to get a balance with this and only include the first 200 characters of the message in the email. My plan is to monitor traffic and processor load vs the number of messages sent before and after the change.

THE question is ...... How do I set a character limit for the message included in the email template? I am imagining something like {select left (200)}

Cheers and thanks in anticipation that many have this knowledge that I do not.

Tassie

 I thought that this would be an easy fix for many but it appears not.

At this end I have been studying html but no luck with setting a character limit for the message posted in the email.

Any clues in the right direction will be appreciated.

Cheers

Tassieswingers

ps. the Dolphin U demo is quite different from 7.1.4 so looking forward to the live version. It looks great so far.

Anyone willing to take this on? My study so far leads me to think I need a php coding change which I would steer away from as it would cause my D7 to be non standard but if it can be done in html in the email template this would work really well.

Cannot be done within the template itself. It has to be done in php code in inc\classes\BxDolMailBox.php to forcibly shorten the message if it's over 200 chars.

 Thanks deano,

guess it' s php study time again.

If I can make it work in a reasonable way I will post back.

Thanks for responding