Question

Im trying to make a template string that has place holders which are replaced by values from a database depending on their inner value.
ie, the template would look like this:

No: {Job_Number}
Customer: {Cust_Name}
Action: {Action}

The template could be changed to anything, with any column value being inside the brackets..
I can not figure a elegant way to get the inner values and replace them with the values…

Answer 1

This has been my solution for this.

Give your format string you can do something like this :

// this is a MatchEvaluater for a regex replace
string me_setFormatValue(Match m){
    // this is the key for the value you want to pull from the database
    // Job_Number, etc...
    string key = m.Groups[1].Value;

    return SomeFunctionToGetValueFromKey(key);
}


void testMethod(){
    string format_string = @"No: {Job_Number}
Customer: {Cust_Name}
Action: {Action}";

    string formatted = Regex.Replace(@"\{([a-zA-Z_-]+?)\}", format_string, me_SetFormatValue);
}