Email Template using XSLT and XSLTArgumentList

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Introduction

This article uses an XSLT file as a template file to store email templates. It specifically targets on usage of Custom Objects Properties to be used in the XSLT file.

Background

Basic knowledge of XML, XPath and XSLT is needed apart from C# and ASP.NET.

Using the code

The Email.cs class in EmailProject can be segregated into various other components to make it as generic as possible. Also, the User.cs and Account.cs class files can be placed in a separate project containing the business objects for the application.

The following are the extracts from the email.cs file:

public static void SetUserDetails()
{
  User myuser = new User();
  myuser.UserName = "ABC";
  myuser.EmailAddress = abc@someemail.com;
  Account myaccount = new Account();
  myaccount.AccountName = "ABC Account";
  Hashtable objHash = new Hashtable();
  objHash["ext:User"] = myuser;
  objHash["ext:Account"] = myaccount;
  SendEmail("xyz@email.com", "emailtemplate.xslt", objHash);
}

The SetUserDetails() function sets the values of User and Account objects. These are objects sent to be used as arguments to the XSLT file. Hence they are added to a HashTable object with the key name as the same as their respective xmlns namespace identifiers in the XSLT file, as shown below.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
  <xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
   xmlns:UserDetails="ext:User"
     xmlns:Account="ext:Account">

XslTransform objxslt = new XslTransform();
objxslt.Load(templatepath + xslttemplatename);
XmlDocument xmldoc = new XmlDocument();
xmldoc.AppendChild(xmldoc.CreateElement("DocumentRoot"));
XPathNavigator xpathnav = xmldoc.CreateNavigator();
XsltArgumentList xslarg = new XsltArgumentList();
if (objDictionary != null)
  foreach (DictionaryEntry entry in objDictionary )
  {
    xslarg.AddExtensionObject(entry.Key.ToString(), entry.Value);
  }
  StringBuilder emailbuilder = new StringBuilder();
  XmlTextWriter xmlwriter = new 
    XmlTextWriter(new System.IO.StringWriter(emailbuilder));
  objxslt.Transform(xpathnav, xslarg, xmlwriter, null);

The above is the code snippet from SendMail method. The arguments to the XslTransform object are added by using the AddExtensionObject method of XsltArgumentlist object.

string subjecttext, bodytext;

XmlDocument xemaildoc = new XmlDocument();
xemaildoc.LoadXml(emailbuilder.ToString());
XmlNode titlenode = xemaildoc.SelectSingleNode("//title");

subjecttext = titlenode.InnerText;

XmlNode bodynode = xemaildoc.SelectSingleNode("//body");

bodytext = bodynode.InnerXml;
if (bodytext.Length > 0)
{
    bodytext = bodytext.Replace("&amp","&");
}

SendEmail(emailto, subjecttext, bodytext);

The above code shows the title text of the XHTML doc to be used as the e-mail's subject and the body text to use used as the body section of the email. This is done by simple XPath.