Razor views as email templates

Question

I am creating an email engine in mvc3 and I am trying to use razor views as email templates. I heard this is possible but I have not yet found any information about it.

Answer 1

You can use http://razorengine.codeplex.com/ to achieve this. It allows you to use razor outside of mvc.

string Email = "Hello @Model.Name! Welcome to Razor!"; string EmailBody = Razor.Parse(Email, new { Name = "World" }); 

It's simple to implement and it's available on http://nuget.codeplex.com/ for easy integration into your projects.

Answer 2

You CAN use a template file to serve as a razor email body template. You can use whichever extension you choose because you can load a file as text in .Net. Let's use the following example for the template:

Hello @Model.Name,  Welcome to @Model.SiteName!  Regards, Site Admins 

Save that file as something like "WelcomeMessage.cshtml", "WelcomeMessage.template", etc. Select the file in Solution Explorer and in the Properties window, select "Copy to Output Directory" and choose "Copy Always". The only down point is that this template has to accompany the application and doesn't compile as a class.

Now we want to parse it as a string to assign to a mail message body. Razor will take the template and a model class, parse them, and then return a string with the necessary values. In your application you will need to add the RazorEngine package which can be found with NuGet. Here's a short code example to illustrate the usage:

using System.IO; using RazorEngine;  // ... MyModel model = new MyModel { Name = "User", SiteName = "Example.com" }; string template = File.OpenText("WelcomeMessage.template").ReadToEnd(); string message = Razor.Parse(template, model); 

It's similar to the other answers but shows a quick way to load the template from a text file.