To be specific, here is what I am doing, and here is what I am trying to do:
I'm coding an ASP.NET page, with VB code behind. When the user clicks a button on the page, I send them an email with information and instructions. Rather than sending a plain text email, I send a nice, pretty, HTML-formatted one. Right now, I'm doing this in a way that I KNOW will be difficult to maintain. That is, I'm straight up writing out all of the html. i.e.
markup += "<fieldset>"
markup += "<legend>"
markup += "Required Documents"
markup += "</legend>"
...and so on. Is there a way to create an aspx page (with vb code behind), and send the html of that page in the body of the email? The information is dynamic, so this pseudo-page would need logic in the on-load event to format the html correctly.
Thanks!
WebClient client = new WebClient ();
string html = client.DownloadString("http://domain.com/emailtemplate.aspx?id=1");
If you have access to a database you can always drop the html in there otherwise, I solved this problem by creating a mailtemplate.html file with [replace] sections in it so all you have to do is read the file into a string object do your replaces and then send it out. If you have to you can maintain multiple templates this way. I use it mostly as a wrapper on emails my systems need to send out so my template has a [body] tag in it that gets replaced with whatever message I need to send. I have also used this method to wrap multiple files into a single email output.
I assume you want to build the html on the fly... One (certainly the most maintainable) solution is to build a template based system.
Technically you maintain your html (e.g. email shots) in a directory read the templates from your ASP.NET program, fill in the details and send the html mail to the user.
Related
I would like for a webmethod to return a string of pure html.
The html isnt anything too fancy, a table and a couple form fields populated with values from a database.
Is their an easy way to build html within html? currently I am just dynamically building up a string, but it just feels dirty.
I could make a full blown aspx page, and then just strip out the bits I dont want from the resulting page leaving the plain html behind. but that also feels dirty.
Or there is the templating option (nvelocity etc) but thats seems like overkill.
any suggestion on something more efficient.
Tx
You can build a template file like xml to write the basic of your html with {0}{1}{2}{n} to put static content in it
Manipulate this template server side as you wish. You can add a list of data into this template.
Create a literal control on your page.
Put the server side created html in to you literal control. (myLiteral.Text)
You can create a basic asp.net file and add the html template in it by adding it from the literal control.
I am creating a website that will offer the option to email the user a copy of dynamic, code-behind, calculation-driven content on a final page of a website. To send an email as of now I obtain the calculation values from the model object again when the user clicks the button, writing all HTML tags by hand, sticking the model data in where needed.
My question is: is there any easier way to copy website output to an html formatted email? I currently code an HTML email by hand and would like the ability to just get a copy of the rendered HTML, and possible modify it from there.
The easiest way (at least for me) is to actually create a webpage that does everything that you want it to do and then scrape it using System.Net.WebClient or System.Net.HttpWebRequest.
So you've got Page1.aspx which allows a person to select some things and submit a form and then you've got Email1.aspx which is the final output. When Page1.aspx is submitted use WebClient to download the contents of Email1.aspx, probably passing a querystring or some cookies over if needed. The user never "sees" Email1.aspx (except in their email of course), its just used behind the scenes.
The advantage of this approach is that you can test the HTML output without having to jump through SMTP hoops. In the Email1.aspx page you could also override the OnRender() method (I think that's the one, might have a different name possibly) if you need to modify the HTML. Or you could modify the HTML after downloading it. If you're performing the same basic HTML modifications you could subclass System.Web.UI.Page, implement your custom rendering and then have all of the emails inherit from your new subclass.
One thing that's important to remember, going down this route creates an HTTP request that's completely separate from the user's request, so things like session and cookies aren't passed over automatically, you'll need to find a way to do that on your own.
You can access the final ready-to-render html using the asp.net
Response.WriteFile("filename");
method
I'm creating a web user control and want to get some html from a datasource and write it to the page. I initially though I should just use response.write, but the problem with that is it writes the message above everything in the page the user control lives in - I guess because the uc is built before the page.
Does any one know of a better approach?
you can use Literal control to write HTML code
I was wondering if its possible to have an ASP.NET AJAX custom usercontrol 'register' its use of CSS files like it does with JS files. ?
Eg: Implementing the IScriptControl interface allows for the GetScriptReferences() to be called by the Script Manager, is there a similar thing for CSS files?
No.
You could write your own methods to use embedded resources and generate html to write them to the page.
As a best-practice approach, though, I wouldn't recommend this. You should have a clear separation of style and markup. If you want to write a custom control that is dependent on a stylesheet, then I suggest that you provide a default css file along with your control.
EDIT (to answer questions in the comments)
You can run this code to add a reference to the CSS file to your page (at runtime). Note that because you're using the RegisterClientScriptBlock method, you can manage insert duplication. Here is an excerpt from the link for the method:
A client script is uniquely identified by its key and its type. Scripts with the same key and type are considered duplicates. Only one script with a given type and key pair can be registered with the page. Attempting to register a script that is already registered does not create a duplicate of the script.
StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
sb.Append(#"<link rel=""stylesheet"" type=""text/css"" href=""");
sb.Append(this.Page.ClientScript.GetWebResourceUrl(this.GetType(), resourceName));
sb.Append(#""" />");
this.Page.ClientScript.RegisterClientScriptBlock(this.GetType(), "MyCSS", sb.ToString());
what do you think of rendering user control as a string template, basically an implementation like Irenderable implementation do you guys think it has any cons. One of the pros that i came across was that i can use my user controls to simply return the required HTML for ajax calls.
You could also use this approach to render html for emails or PDF. I've done a lot of hackery to grab my pages and render their output to a string builder so I can convert them or email.
I do this when you need a print to pdf for the current page, or email this page and you want to send the html that the user is currently looking at.