Send email with a table inside

Question

Im am creating an email using MailMessage and would like to embed a dynamically populated table. I've set a MailMessage property to IsBodyHtml so I've already been able to insert HTML encoded text into the body of the email. Using that I could easily create the top and bottom of the table, but creating the rows seems like a StringBuilder nightmare.

The table will have 6 columns and a variable number of rows that would be populated from a collection. The requestor would prefer NOT to send the data as an attachment.

Any suggestions on how to best develop a better solution?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

It's really not a StringBuilder nightmare at all.

You can build a class, call it TableBuilder or whatever you'd like, that will encapsulate this logic.

    public class TableBuider
    {

        private StringBuilder builder = new StringBuilder();


        public string[] BodyData { get; set; }
        public int BodyRows { get; set; }


        public TableBuider(int bodyRows, string[] bodyData)
        {
            BodyData = bodyData;
            BodyRows = bodyRows;
        }

        /// <summary>
        /// Since your table headers are static, and your table body
        /// is variable, we don't need to store the headers. Instead
        /// we need to know the number of rows and the information
        /// that goes in those rows.
        /// </summary>
        public TableBuider(string[] tableInfo, int bodyRows)
        {
            BodyData = tableInfo;
            BodyRows = bodyRows;
        }

        public string BuildTable()
        {
            BuildTableHead();
            BuildTableBody();
            return builder.ToString();
        }

        private void BuildTableHead()
        {
            builder.Append("<table>");
            builder.Append("<thead>");
            builder.Append("<tr>");
            AppendTableHeader("HeaderOne");
            AppendTableHeader("HeaderTwo");
            builder.Append("</tr>");
            builder.Append("</thead>");
        }

        private void BuildTableBody()
        {
            builder.Append("<tbody>");
            builder.Append("<tr>");
            // For every row we need added, append a <td>info</td>
            // to the table from the data we have
            for (int i = 0; i < BodyRows; i++)
            {
                AppendTableDefinition(BodyData[i]);
            }
            builder.Append("</tr>");
            builder.Append("</table");
        }

        private void AppendTableHeader(string input)
        {
            AppendTag("th", input);
        }

        private void AppendTableDefinition(string input)
        {
            AppendTag("td", input);
        }

        private void AppendTag(string tag, string input)
        {
            builder.Append("<" + tag + ">");
            builder.Append(input);
            builder.Append("</" + tag + ">");
        }

    }
}

The AppendTableHeader, AppendTableDefinition, and AppendTag methods encapsulate all of the tedious parts of the StringBuilder.

This is just a basic example as well, you can build upon it as well.

Answer 2

This article is Lightswitch specific. But the example code shows how to use XHTML and embedded LINQ expressions to populate a variable row table in an HTML email. I think you should be able to adapt it to suit your application.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bethmassi/archive/2011/01/27/how-to-send-html-email-from-a-lightswitch-application.aspx