Use ASP.NET to e-mail contents of an entire HTML Page?

Question

I have a HTML page that I have created that essentially consists of:

<div>
   <table>
       <tr>
          <td><asp:label runat="server" id="someText"></asp:label></td>
       </tr>
   </table>
</div>

The label text is generated on page load from an SQL query.

The above is a very basic and simplified version of what I have on my page.

What I'd like to achieve is to be able to e-mail the entirety of the rendered HTML page without having to build the page again in my code-behind to send it.

Is there a way of doing this?

Thanks in advance for any help.

Answer 1

Use a webclient:

Dim wc As New WebClient
Dim str As String = wc.DownloadString("yoururl.com")
SendEmail(str) ' your email method '

Answer 2

Something like this maybe (haven't tested):

StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
HtmlTextWriter hw = new HtmlTextWriter(new System.IO.StringWriter(sb));

this.Render(hw);

MailMessage message = new MailMessage();
message.IsBodyHtml = true;
message.Body = sb.ToString();

(new SmtpClient()).Send(message);

Answer 3

If you want to send the email as you render the page, without rerunning the page lifecycle, try the following.

Make a wrapper stream class that inherits Stream and contains two additional streams, and override its Write method to write to both streams. I don't think you need to override anything else except the Can_Whaterver_ properties, but I'm not sure.

Make a field in your Page class of type MemoryStream to hold a copy of the response.

Then, handle the page's PreInit event and set the Response.Filter, like this:

Response.Filter = new CopierStream(Response.Filter, responseCopy);
//`CopierStream` is the custom stream class; `responseCopy` is the MemoryStream

Finally, override the Page's Render method, and, after calling base.Render, you can send responseCopy by email using the SmtpClient class.

This is a very complicated technique that you should only do if you really don't want to re-run the page lifecycle.

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Whichever way you do it, if your page has any images or hyperlinks, make sure that their urls include the domain name, or else they won't work in the email.