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How to trigger Email as a Validation Action

This guide will help you trigger emails as a Validation Action . It will allow you to send an email including information about a Validation Result, including whether or not the Validation succeeded.

Prerequisites

This how-to guide assumes that you have already:

  • Configured an email account on the SMTP server you are going to use to send the email
  • Identified the email addresses that messages will be sent to.

Steps#

  1. Open uncommitted/config_variables.yml file and add the following variables by adding the following lines:
smtp_address: [address of the smtp server]smtp_port: [port used by the smtp server]sender_login: [login used to send the email]sender_password: [password used to send the email]sender_alias: [optional alias used to send the email (default = sender_login)]receiver_emails: [addresses you want to send the email to]  # each address must be separated by commas
  1. Open great_expectations.yml and add send_email_on_validation_result action to validation_operators. Make sure the following section exists in the great_expectations.yml file.
validation_operators:    action_list_operator:        # To learn how to configure sending emails during evaluation        # (and other customizations), (/docs/reference/checkpoints-and-actions/)         class_name: ActionListValidationOperator        action_list:        #--------------------------------        # here is what you will be adding        #--------------------------------        - name: send_email_on_validation_result # name can be set to any value          action:            class_name: EmailAction            notify_on: all # possible values: "all", "failure", "success"            notify_with: # optional list containing the DataDocs sites to include in the notification. Defaults to including links to all configured sites.            # You can choose between using SSL encryption, TLS encryption or none of them (not advised)            use_tls: False            use_ssl: True            renderer:              module_name: great_expectations.render.renderer.email_renderer              class_name: EmailRenderer            # put the actual following information in the uncommitted/config_variables.yml file            # or pass in as environment variable            smtp_address: ${smtp_address}            smtp_port: ${smtp_port}            sender_login: ${sender_login}            sender_password: ${sender_password}            sender_alias: ${sender_alias}            receiver_emails: ${receiver_emails}  # string containing email addresses separated by commas
  1. Run your action_list_operator, to validate a batch of data and receive an email on the success or failure of validation suite. context.run_validation_operator('action_list_operator', assets_to_validate=batch, run_name="email_test")

If successful, you should receive an email that looks like this:

image

Additional notes#

If your great_expectations.yml contains multiple configurations for Data Docs sites, all of them will be included in the email by default. If you would like to be more specific, you can configure the notify_with variable in your great_expectations.yml.

The following example will configure the email to include links Data Docs at local_site and s3_site.

# Example data_docs_sites configurationdata_docs_sites:  local_site:    class_name: SiteBuilder    show_how_to_buttons: true    store_backend:      class_name: TupleFilesystemStoreBackend      base_directory: uncommitted/data_docs/local_site/    site_index_builder:      class_name: DefaultSiteIndexBuilder  s3_site:  # this is a user-selected name - you may select your own    class_name: SiteBuilder    store_backend:      class_name: TupleS3StoreBackend      bucket: data-docs.my_org  # UPDATE the bucket name here to match the bucket you configured above.    site_index_builder:      class_name: DefaultSiteIndexBuilder      show_cta_footer: true
validation_operators:    action_list_operator:    ...    - name: send_email_on_validation_result # name can be set to any value          action:            class_name: EmailAction            notify_on: all # possible values: "all", "failure", "success"            #--------------------------------            # This is what was configured            #--------------------------------            notify_with:              - local_site              - gcs_site            use_ssl: True            use_tls: False            renderer:              module_name: great_expectations.render.renderer.email_renderer              class_name: EmailRenderer            # put the actual following information in the uncommitted/config_variables.yml file            # or pass in as environment variable            smtp_address: ${smtp_address}            smtp_port: ${smtp_port}            sender_login: ${sender_login}            sender_password: ${sender_password}            sender_alias: ${sender_alias}            receiver_emails: ${receiver_emails} # string containing email addresses separated by commas

Additional resources#

The EmailAction uses smtplib. You can get more information about this module here.