Sending Email using Templates Asp.net:

Sending Email using Templates Asp.net:

Previous post explained about the Sending Email from Asp.net With Dynamic Content

 Recently I Was found a better way to format my email messages in ASP.NET using the MailDefinition object. It lets you to use an email template and define tokens which you want to replace in it. This helps keep the presentation and business layers clean & separate and lets the designers go in and edit the email templates without having to navigate the StringBuilder.

This article explains how to send email using ASP.NET. Yes, there are many other articles that cover sending email via .NET, I found that many articles suggest you create your HTML email using a string with the HTML markup in it. In this article we will look at a more detailed solution. One in which we use a regular HTML file as our template for the email. The template file will be a standard HTML file with the exception of some placeholders that we will use to populate our content and images right before we send the email. Think mail-merge in Microsoft Word. Finally, we will also learn how to send the email in such a way that if the email recipient's mail-client can't render HTML then they will get an alternate plain text version.


Here’s how its done.

private void SendEmail()
{
 Customer customer = CustomerData.GetCustomer(2);
 
 MailDefinition mailDefinition = new MailDefinition();
 mailDefinition.BodyFileName = "~/Email-Templates/Order-Confirmation.html";
 mailDefinition.From = "no-reply@gmail.com";

 //Create a key-value collection of all the tokens you want to replace in your template...
 ListDictionary ldReplacements = new ListDictionary();
 ldReplacements.Add("<%FirstName%>", customer.FirstName);
 ldReplacements.Add("<%LastName%>", customer.LastName);
 ldReplacements.Add("<%Address1%>", customer.Address1);
 ldReplacements.Add("<%Address2%>", customer.Address2);
 ldReplacements.Add("<%City%>", customer.City);
 ldReplacements.Add("<%State%>", customer.State);
 ldReplacements.Add("<%Zip%>", customer.Zip);

 string mailTo = string.Format("{0} {1} <{2}>", customer.FirstName, customer.LastName, customer.EmailAddress);
 MailMessage mailMessage = mailDefinition.CreateMailMessage(mailTo, ldReplacements, this);
 mailMessage.From = new MailAddress("no-reply@my-site.com", "My Site");
 mailMessage.IsBodyHtml = true;
 mailMessage.Subject = "Order Confirmation";

 SmtpClient smtpClient = new SmtpClient(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["SMTPServer"].ToString(), 25);
 smtpClient.Send(mailMessage);
}

Your email template could be of any extension (txt, html, etc) as long as its in a text format. I personally like to keep it in HTML format so that we can preview the email template in a browser. Basically it’ll looks something like this -

Hello <%FirstName%> <%LastName%>,

Thank you for creating an account with us. Here are your details:

<%Address1%>,
<%Address2%>
<%City%>, <%State%> <%Zip%>

Thank You,
My Site

Change the web.config file mail settings like bellow  for setting mail host details 


<system.net>

    <mailSettings>

      <smtp from="ramakrishna.p@gmail.com">

        <network host="smtp.gmail.com"  />

      </smtp>

    </mailSettings>

  </system.net>




Remarks




The MailDefinition class can be used by controls to create a MailMessage object from a text file or a string that contains the body of the e-mail message. Use the MailDefinitionclass to simplify creating predefined e-mail messages to be sent by a control. If you want to send e-mail not using a control, see the System.Net.mail class.

You can make text substitutions in the body of the e-mail message by passing to the CreateMailMessage method an IDictionary instance that maps strings to their replacements.




Small Note :




The MailDefinition class does not support data binding. Properties of the MailDefinition class cannot be bound to data using the <%#   %> data-binding expression syntax.