Question

I need to send email notifications to users and I need to allow the admin to provide a template for the message body (and possibly headers, too).

I’d like something like string.Format that allows me to give named replacement strings, so the template can look like this:

Dear {User},  Your job finished at {FinishTime} and your file is available for download at {FileURL}.  Regards,  --  {Signature} 

What’s the simplest way for me to do that?

Answer 1

Use a templating engine. StringTemplate is one of those, and there are many.

Example:

using Antlr.StringTemplate; using Antlr.StringTemplate.Language;   StringTemplate hello = new StringTemplate("Hello, $name$", typeof(DefaultTemplateLexer)); hello.SetAttribute("name", "World"); Console.Out.WriteLine(hello.ToString());