ASP.NET MVC Email Template Solution

If you are like me then you have probably ran into a wall with using ASP.NET MVC View Engine to render your awesome Dynamic HTML Email Templates. At least you put up a fight using a lot of fake data. It is actually possible to get around it!

        var oldContext = HttpContext.Current;
        HttpContext.Current = new HttpContext(HttpContext.Current.Request,
        fakeResponse);

        var html = new HtmlHelper(new ViewContext(fakeControllerContext,
        new FakeView(), fakeViewDataDictionary, new TempDataDictionary()),
        new ViewPage());

        html.RenderPartial(viewName, viewData, viewDataDictionary);
        HttpContext.Current = oldContext; //yay 

Though, because you’re reading this you’re like me and you never give up! So how, how do you get around all of this? The answer is Spark. Eeek, another DLL? Yes, Spark is its own View Engine which is an entire different framework. Yes, you have to go to their website download the DLLS, put it in your Lib folder and reference it in your code. Let me tell you now, it is well worth it. Let’s dive in!

Let’s write the code to render our email using the Spark. We want our code to take in the template name, something like: “ForgotUsernameEmail.spark” and we also want it to reuse our current ViewData Object which is of type ViewDataDictionary and contains Person data, we will need to add this into our own implementation of AbstractSparkView. See samples bellow:

Render Email Method:

public string RenderEmail(string sparkViewName, ViewDataDictionary
viewData)
{
     var email = new StringWriter();
     var view = (EmailTemplateBase) _engine.CreateInstance(new
     SparkViewDescriptor().AddTemplate(sparkViewName));
     view.ViewData = viewData;

     try
     {
         view.RenderView(email);
     }
     finally
     {
         _engine.ReleaseInstance(view);
     }
     return email.ToString();
}

Oops thanks Arnis, forgot to mention EmailTemplateBase is just an extended version of AbstractSparkView that includes the ASP.NET MVC ViewDataDictionary.

Custom Spark AbstractSparkView with ViewData implementation:

    public abstract class EmailTemplateBase : AbstractSparkView
    {
        public ViewDataDictionary ViewData { get; set; }

        public object Eval(string expression)
        {
            return ViewData.Eval(expression);
        }

        public string Eval(string expression, string format)
        {
            return ViewData.Eval(expression, format);
        }

    }

So that’s done, let’s make the template… In my MVC Web Project I am going to add into my Views folder or maybe even Views/Email a file called “ForgotUsernameEmail.spark”.

Dear ${#name}:


Your username is ${#userName}.


Thank You.

I also put in a use tag to pull down a Signature file, since this is the same in everyone of my emails. Now let’s actually write the code to call it:

string email = RenderEmail("ForgotUsernameEmail.spark",ViewData);

And that’s all you need to do, well besides read up on spark syntax: http://www.sparkviewengine.com/documentation/configuring