Is there a better .NET template system than XSLT?

Question

I am creating a web application that will need to send a variety of emails out to users. Instead of hard-coding the contents of the email in the app, I want to use a template stored on disk and replace tokens in it (ex. "Hello, %%FirstName%%!") with the actual data. I have some experience with creating XSLT templates, but since the data isn't naturally in XML format this may not be the best fit. Is there a better template tool in .NET?

Note that I prefer one built in to the language but I'd consider add-ons too.

Thanks,

Graham

Answer 1

You may want to take a look at MVCContrib. They have an e-mail template system IEmailTemplateService that uses Views to render the actual e-mail message which gives you access to a lot of features, including different view engines. If you are not in an MVC environment, you could possibly still extract some useful tricks out there.

Answer 2

I am using NVelocity for that, and I find it's very flexible and easy to use. It not only allows you to replace tokes, but it also includes sort of a programming language, e.g. for conditionals (if) and loops (for, foreach).

The original project seems to be dead, but there is a fork maintained by the Castle project.

Of course there are lots of other, alternative template libraries (stringtemplate seems to be popular), as you can see in this question I asked some time ago.

Answer 3

I have personally use Spark. Its an easy to use text templating library (below is an example of Spark syntax)

<var names="new [] {'alpha', 'beta', 'gamma'}"/>
<for each="var name in names">
  <test if="name == 'beta'">
    <p>beta is my favorite.</p>
    <else/>
    <p>${name} is okay too I suppose. 
  </test>
</for>

It even comes with a sample code for email text templating which you could look at on github.