ASP.NET MVC Email

Question

Is their a solution to generate an email template using an ASP.NET MVC View without having to jump through hoops.

Let me elaborate jumping through hoops.

Answer 1

Why do you need to create the email from a view? Why not use a plain old template file? I do this all the time - I make a template and use the NVelocity engine from the castle project (not to be confused with an nvelocity VIEW engine) to render the template.

Example:

var nvEngine = new NVelocityEngine();
nvEngine.Context.Add("FullName", fullName);
nvEngine.Context.Add("MallName", voucher.Mall.Name);
nvEngine.Context.Add("ConfirmationCode", voucher.ConfirmationCode);
nvEngine.Context.Add("BasePath", basePath);
nvEngine.Context.Add("TermsLink", termsLink);
nvEngine.Context.Add("LogoFilename", voucher.Mall.LogoFilename);

var htmlTemplate = System.IO.File.ReadAllText(
    Request.MapPath("~/App_Data/Templates/Voucher.html"));

var email = nvEngine.Render(htmlTemplate);

The NVelocityEngine class is a wrapper I wrote around the NVelocity port provided by the Castle project as shown below:

using System;
using System.Collections;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.IO;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using NVelocity;
using NVelocity.App;

namespace MyProgram
{
    /// 

    /// A wrapper for the NVelocity template processor
    /// 
    public class NVelocityEngine : VelocityEngine
    {
        Hashtable context = new Hashtable();

        /// 

        /// A list of values to be merged with the template
        /// 
        public Hashtable Context
        {
            get { return context; }
        }

        /// 

        /// Default constructor
        /// 
        public NVelocityEngine()
        {
            base.Init();
        }

        /// 

        /// Renders a template by merging it with the context items
        /// 
        public string Render(string template)
        {
            VelocityContext nvContext;

            nvContext = new VelocityContext(context);
            using (StringWriter writer = new StringWriter())
            {
                this.Evaluate(nvContext, writer, "template", template);
                return writer.ToString();
            }
        }
    }
}

In this way, you don't have to meddle with the view engine at all, and you can theoretically chain this with the ASP.NET view engine if you wanted, like I have done in the following controller method:

public ActionResult ViewVoucher(string e)
{
    e = e.Replace(' ', '+');
    var decryptedEmail = CryptoHelper.Decrypt(e);
    var voucher = Voucher.FindByEmail(decryptedEmail);
    if (voucher == null) return View("Error", new Exception("Voucher not found."));

    var basePath = new Uri(Request.Url, Url.Content("~/")).ToString();
    var termsLink = new Uri(Request.Url, Url.Action("TermsGC", "Legal")).ToString();
    basePath = basePath.Substring(0, basePath.Length - 1);

    var fullName = voucher.FirstName;
    if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(voucher.LastName))
        fullName += " " + voucher.LastName;

    var nvEngine = new NVelocityEngine();
    nvEngine.Context.Add("FullName", fullName);
    nvEngine.Context.Add("MallName", voucher.Mall.Name);
    nvEngine.Context.Add("ConfirmationCode", voucher.ConfirmationCode);
    nvEngine.Context.Add("BasePath", basePath);
    nvEngine.Context.Add("TermsLink", termsLink);
    nvEngine.Context.Add("LogoFilename", voucher.Mall.LogoFilename);

    var htmlTemplate = System.IO.File.ReadAllText(
        Request.MapPath("~/App_Data/Templates/Voucher.html"));

    return Content(nvEngine.Render(htmlTemplate));
}