Best pratice to populate data in a template?

Question

I am wondering what solutions out there for populating data for a template. Right now we store email templates in the datatabse with place holders in them. When we need to send out the emails, we would replace the actual value in for the place holder. This solution works, except it is very hard to debug.

Thanks in advance.

Angela

Answer 1

If you're looking for a more structured and programmatic way to send templates, you might want to look at XML, XSD and XSLT. You would have a well-defined templating mechanism, which would offer you repeating and conditional functionality. Defining an appropriate XML schema and validating against it would allow you to catch errors during the generation of your emails.