Very useful thanks.

Just two words: Absolutly great! Thanks!

Oh it's very good,but i need .vb code
who can help me?
i wanner make a webform which can send mail in using vb lang
my Email :snowouldance@hotmail.com

Look very nice.

However, is it wise to use response.write () to display the dynamic info in a control?
As I understand it, this will break the encapsulation provided by the page framework. Better perhaps to use literal controls to display the data....?

Cheers,
Mark

asef

This is perfect solution i was looking for.
I have developed my own COM object to create templated emails in ASP. But since i can not easily pass .NET objects to COM object i was looking for something similar for .NET. Only when i read this i understood how easily it can be done.

it is a very interesting material. Thanks

This is one of those simple solutions to a common problem that makes me wonder, "why in the hell didn't I think of that."

Response to Tony, the following is the codes in VB.NET. Enjoy .NET!
Note: The author assumes the readers know the basic of how to create web application and user controls.

ForgotPasswordEmail.ascx (HTML edit mode)

Here is your password reminder.
-----------------------------------
YOUR ACCOUNT INFORMATION:
Login:
Password:
-----------------------------------
TO CHANGE YOUR ACCOUNT INFORMATION:
You can change your account information by logging in and selecting 'Account Information'. This is an automated message; please do not reply to this email.

ForgotPasswordEmail.ascx.vb

Enter the following codes( Public Username As String, Public Password As String) right below Public Class ForgotPasswordEmail Inherits System.Web.UI.UserControl
Like:
Public Class ForgotPasswordEmail
Inherits System.Web.UI.UserControl
Public Username As String
Public Password As String

On your WebForm
Import the following assembly:
Imports System
Imports System.IO
Imports System.Web.UI
Imports System.Web.Mail

Enter these codes in Page_Load module for testing:
Dim emailTemplate As ForgotPasswordEmail = LoadControl("~/ForgotPasswordEmail.ascx")
emailTemplate.Username = "jroberts"
emailTemplate.Password = "a7e945"

Dim stringWriter As StringWriter = New StringWriter
Dim htmlWriter As HtmlTextWriter = New HtmlTextWriter(stringWriter)
emailTemplate.RenderControl(htmlWriter)
Dim body As String = stringWriter.ToString()
SmtpMail.SmtpServer = "localhost"
SmtpMail.Send("system@localhost", _
"jroberts@localhost", _
"Password Reminder", _
body)

Another great example of the power of the object!

I am embarassed at how simple it is to get the html string of a control and do whatever I want with it.

.NET Lives! God bless objects.

The vb code doesnt work. there is no such thing as
Dim emailTemplate As ForgotPasswordEmail = LoadControl("~/ForgotPasswordEmail.ascx")

this is not possible.

Yes, vb code doesnt work. It should be as following with explicitly converting:
Dim emailTemplate As ForgotPasswordEmail = CType(LoadControl("~/ForgotPasswordEmail.vb.ascx"),ForgotPasswordEmail )

very good!
I am looking forword so good topic every day.

Nice but I think there are others way, and easy to do the same work, you can provide HTML templates (which design by Front Page...) with a set of predefined tags, at runtime, load this file and replace the tags with their values. Using this way you can seperate the templates from application code, I mean that your can edit the templates for their intention.

dd

>However, is it wise to use response.write () to
>display the dynamic info in a control?
>As I understand it, this will break the
>encapsulation provided by the page framework.
>Better perhaps to use literal controls to
>display the data....?
>
>Cheers,
>Mark

The UserControl Class defines Request and Response properties.

Steve

I get the error: - Any suggestions?
Type 'ForgotPasswordEmail' is not defined.

Source Error:
Dim emailTemplate As ForgotPasswordEmail = CType(LoadControl
"~/Controls/EmailTemplates/ForgotPasswordEmail.ascx"),ForgotPasswordEmail)

IMO, this is more elegent and can be used in winforms apps OR webform ones. it requires a text template file which has tokens in it

a VB eg of usage is below

dim x as new TemplateParser
x.TemplateFile = "c:\whatever.htm"
x.Tokens = "Token1|Token2|Token3" 'seperate each token by a |
x.Values = "value1|value2|value3" 'seperate each value that replaces the corresponding tokens by a |

emailbody = x.GetParsedFile()

'then email off emailbody to whoever.

the TemplateParser is below.

--- start copying here ---

Imports System.IO

Public Class TemplateParser

Private pTemplateFile As String

Public Property TemplateFile() As String
Get
Return pTemplateFile
End Get
Set(ByVal Value As String)
If Value.IndexOf("\") = -1 Then
Throw New System.Exception("TemplateFile must be a full path and filename")
Else
pTemplateFile = Value
End If
End Set
End Property

Private pTokens() As String

Public WriteOnly Property Tokens() As String

Set(ByVal Value As String)
If Value.Length > 0 Then
pTokens = Value.Split("|")
Else
Throw New System.Exception("There must be at least 1 element in the Tokens array")
End If
End Set
End Property

Private pValues() As String

Public WriteOnly Property Values() As String

Set(ByVal Value As String)
If Value.Length > 0 Then
pValues = Value.Split("|")
Else
Throw New System.Exception("There must be at least 1 element in the Values array")
End If
End Set
End Property

Public Function GetParsedFile() As String

CheckArguments()

Dim FileContents As New System.Text.StringBuilder(), counter As Integer

If StripHead Then
FileContents = FileContents.Append(GetHTMLPageBody(GetFileContents(TemplateFile)))
Else
FileContents = FileContents.Append(GetFileContents(TemplateFile))
End If

For counter = LBound(pTokens) To UBound(pTokens)
FileContents = FileContents.Replace(pTokens(counter), pValues(counter))
Next

Return FileContents.ToString

End Function

Private Sub CheckArguments()
If TemplateFile = vbNullString Then
Throw New System.Exception("You have not specified a file to parse")
End If

If pValues.Length = 0 Then
Throw New System.Exception("There must be at least 1 element in the Values array")
End If

If pTokens.Length = 0 Then
Throw New System.Exception("There must be at least 1 element in the Tokens array")
End If
End Sub

Private Function GetFileContents(ByVal FileName As String) As String
Dim sr As StreamReader
Dim FileText As String

sr = File.OpenText(FileName)
FileText = sr.ReadToEnd
sr.Close()

Return FileText
End Function

Private Function GetHTMLPageBody(ByVal HTMLPage As String) As String
'this function returns all the text between the and tags of HTMLPage
Dim pos As Integer, endpos As Integer
pos = HTMLPage.ToLower.IndexOf("", pos)
endpos = HTMLPage.ToLower.IndexOf("", pos)

If endpos = -1 Then Return HTMLPage

Return HTMLPage.Substring(pos + 1, endpos - pos - 1)

End Function

Public StripHead As Boolean

Public Sub New()
StripHead = False
End Sub
End Class

Nice little article - I have been toying with the idea of writing some templates and was thinking about an XML/XSLT solution. For eg:
Your templates are xslt files that render the XML however they want (so that handles the layout and UI side of it. The templated parses an XML document and populates the fields it needs... any thoughts from anyone on this? Is it too complicated?

What if one was trying to do this from a class file and not from the page itself. How would you load the control?

Dim emailTemplate As ForgotPasswordEmail = CType(LoadControl("~/ForgotPasswordEmail.vb.ascx"),ForgotPasswordEmail )

how can this be done from a class file instead of directly from a page. I have a function in a class files which sends out emails. I want to load the template and render to html within the file. Can anyone help? thanks.

dsadsa

Hi Rodney,

for me personally the xml/xslt is more extensibel than the ascx solution, especially if you are using some hundreds of templates, but the xml/xslt solution is much more work-intensive ...

Greetings

Stefan

Hi Stefan,

Instead of XML/XSLT, you could use the NVelocity template engine to implement template-driven emails.

http://nvelocity.sourceforge.net/

thank you !!
very good.

Just what I was looking for.
One question, would it be possible to have the template contain the subject, format and other parameters..?

I am thinking of using this, but not making the template class abstact.

This way I can populate some standard parameters on each template, such as subject, htmlformat, etc, so I could pass those values to the sendmail call.

any thoughts?

thanks

Wow, great idea. Very insightful. 8)

thanks reply my question in
http://blog.fluentconsulting.com/archives/000042.html
i have a another problem.

if my mail from snowouldance@hotmail.com to snowood@hotmail.com
i dim SmtpMail.SmtpServer = "localhost"
but i found that it's hard to receive mail in snowood's mailbox or it's will use a long time
that's why?

I ran into an issue with this way.

How do I include the images in the template? As they are not strings, so won't be treated as Text.

Any suggestions on that guys?

Thanks in advance.
Pankaj

Pankaj,
To include images in your email, set the format of the email to html as shown in the article. Then to support the most email clients make sure your image urls are absolute paths and set the UrlContentBase to the same server. You also can find more useful articles on html emails here: http://www.templatekit.com/articles.php?cat_type=A&cat_id=6

Here is a slight varation to load the template with data from a class. The class has a load method to extract the data from a table.

Private Sub Print1_Click(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Print1.Click

Dim emailTemplate As PressBriefClient = CType(LoadControl("~/EmailTemplates/PressBriefClient.ascx"), PressBriefClient)
Dim pressBrief As New PressBrief
pressBrief.Load(_projID)

Dim ContactName As Label = emailTemplate.FindControl("lblContactName")
ContactName.Text = pressBrief._clientContact
Dim ContactTel As Label = emailTemplate.FindControl("lblContactTel")
ContactTel.Text = pressBrief._clientContactTel
Dim ContactFax As Label = emailTemplate.FindControl("lblContactFax")
ContactFax.Text = pressBrief._clientContactFax
Dim ContactEmail As Label = emailTemplate.FindControl("lblContactEmail")
ContactEmail.Text = pressBrief._clientContactEmail
Dim CopyAvailability As Label = emailTemplate.FindControl("lblCopyAvailability")
CopyAvailability.Text = pressBrief._dateofCopy
Dim CreativeName As Label = emailTemplate.FindControl("lblCreativeName")
CreativeName.Text = pressBrief._creativeContact
Dim CreativeTel As Label = emailTemplate.FindControl("lblCreativeTel")
CreativeTel.Text = pressBrief._creativeContactTel
Dim CreativeFax As Label = emailTemplate.FindControl("lblCreativeFax")
CreativeFax.Text = pressBrief._creativeContactFax
Dim CreativeEmail As Label = emailTemplate.FindControl("lblCreativeEmail")
CreativeEmail.Text = pressBrief._creativeContactEmail
Dim Requirements As Label = emailTemplate.FindControl("lblRequirements")
Requirements.Text = pressBrief._regionalRequirments
Dim Budget As Label = emailTemplate.FindControl("lblBudget")
Budget.Text = pressBrief._budget
Dim Phasing As Label = emailTemplate.FindControl("lblPhasing")
Phasing.Text = pressBrief._budgetPhasing
Dim StartDate As Label = emailTemplate.FindControl("lblStartDate")
StartDate.Text = pressBrief._campaignStart
Dim EndDate As Label = emailTemplate.FindControl("lblEndDate")
EndDate.Text = pressBrief._campaignEnd
Dim Commision As Label = emailTemplate.FindControl("lblCommision")
Commision.Text = pressBrief._clientCommision
Dim Comments As Label = emailTemplate.FindControl("lblComments")
Comments.Text = pressBrief._clientCommision

Dim stringWriter As StringWriter = New StringWriter
Dim htmlWriter As HtmlTextWriter = New HtmlTextWriter(stringWriter)
emailTemplate.RenderControl(htmlWriter)

Dim body As String = stringWriter.ToString()
Dim WFMail As Mail = New Mail
WFMail.EmailBrief(_user.UserID, body)

End Sub

Great article, immensely helpful. I, too wanted to implement this from a class, but I also wanted to create a generic "Send Templated EMail" method where I could specify a template and parameters, so here's what I did:

I created an interface:

public interface ITemplatedEMail{
string Subject{ get; }
void SetParameters(ListItemCollection templateValues)
}

Then in the .ascx file I inherit from ITemplatedEMail and implement the Subject property and the SetParameters() method. The SetParameters() for the ForgotPassword example would simply be:

public void SetParameters(ListItemCollection items){
UserName = items.FindByText("UserName").Value.ToString();
Password = items.FindByText("Password").Value.ToString();
}

And the subject property would just be:
public string Subject{ get { return "Password Reminder";}}

The method that send the email is SendTemplatedEMail(string templateName,ListItemCollection valueCol)

I get the template path from the config and build it and then:

UserControl ctrl = new userControl();
ITemplatedEMail emailTemp = (ITemplatedEMail)ctrl.LoadControl(templateFullPath);
ctrl = (UserControl)emailTemp;
eMailTemp.SetParameters(valueCol);

The rest of the code is the same as the above example, except:

mailMessage.Subject=emailTemp.Subject.

The web page which sends the e-mail just looks like:

(create mail service object)
ListItemCollection col = new ListItemCollection();
col.Add(New ListItem("UserName","JohnSmith");
col.Add(New ListItem("Password","abc123");

The only drawback is that you have to know the names of the ListItems that you are going to set, but otherwise it works great. Wouldn't have been able to do it without this article, really the most useful thing I've seen in a long time and I've started implementing it everywhere. My app send out a TON of e-mails and I've always been jealous of those nicely formatted ones the big guys send out.

p.s.: I might be looking for a job soon.

sweet

What happen if the user control you are loading has it's own databinding events i.e. page.load events. These are not fired when you load a control this way! I have tried to override the render event but with no success.

Reason I ask is that the control I'm trying to load binds data to a datagrid!