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Binding a POCO to an html document and generating the result to a string

Answer 1

A:

My overall approach would be to use an appropriate XML Serializer (DataContractSerializer or the XmlSerializer,) pass your serializable POCO in, recieve the resulting XML; and transform that with an XSLT stylesheet to generate the output HTML.

The transformation pipeline would look something like this

POCO ----[XmlSerializer]--> XML -------[XSLT]-----> HTML

Gurdas Nijor 2009-10-16 20:11:17

Answer 2

A:

You could use a templating engine to achieve this. The first step would be to define your HTML template containing placeholders for the object property values. Then you feed the templating engine with the template and an object which will produce the final result. Here's an example using NVelocity:

class Program
{
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        Velocity.Init();

        // Define a template that will represent your HTML structure.
        var template = "<html><body><div>$key1</div><div>$key2.ToString('dd/MM/yyyy')</div></body></html>";
        var context = new VelocityContext();
        // The values you are passing here could be complex objects with many properties 
        context.Put("key1", "Hello World");
        context.Put("key2", DateTime.Now);
        var sb = new StringBuilder();
        using (var writer = new StringWriter(sb))
        using (var reader = new StringReader(template))
        {
            Velocity.Evaluate(context, writer, null, reader);
        }
        Console.WriteLine(sb.ToString());
        // This will print: <html><body><div>Hello World</div><div>16/10/2009</div></body></html>
    }
}

Darin Dimitrov 2009-10-16 21:56:18

That's exactly it - thanks Darin!

MarkB 2009-10-17 01:12:13

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Binding a POCO to an html document and generating the result to a string

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