Today I had the need to take a list of names from a returned list of Custom Objects, and convert one of its properties it to a string that included some HTML. This is nothing fancy, and pretty standard/simple but I thought I’d post about it anyway. Since I did not need a custom ToString() method here to convert all properties of my object, I just created a simple method to iterate through the list of objects and add one of the properties to the StringBuilder object then return my string with HTML.
The reason I needed to do this, was because a customer selects for example a list of Entrees in a Web Form. I need to send that list formatted with HTML in an email to a client:
So after the customer selects the values, submits them, then now I want to retrieve them and include the selected items in an HTML email.
First, since the retrieved list was just a list of Entrees from my Data Layer Custom Class, and my class does not implement IEnumerable (yet that is), I can’t just loop through this list of custom objects. So I in the meantime, I shoved it into a generic list first just so that I can iterate through the list of objects or sort them if I wish:
1: List<Entree> entrees;
2: entrees = Entree.RetrieveAllByOrderID(request.OrderID);
And now I’m creating a string variable and assigning to it a formatted string result with some HTML, by calling a method which iterates through the generic list, and shoves the Entree Name (which is a property of the Entree class) into some sort of HTML formatted list; in this case I used line breaks:
1: string entreesList = ConvertEnteesListToHTMLString(entrees);
The method which is pretty common, nothing special. It just accepts an incoming generic list of Entree objects, loops through each Entree and converts the property EntreeName to a string and concatenates it using a StringBuilder and appends am HTML line break between each:
1: private static string ConvertEnteesListToHTMLString(List<Entree> entreesList)
2: {
3: StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
4: foreach (Entree entree in entreesList)
5: {
6: sb.Append(entree.EntreeName.ToString());
7: sb.Append("<br>");
8: }
9: string html = sb.ToString();
10: return html;
11: }
Now the string I’m sending as part of the HTML email looks like this:
"Carne Asada<br>Carnitas<br>Carne Desebrada<br>Chicken Mole<br>"
And obviously then the owner sees a nice list of entrees selected by their customer in the email:
Carne Asada
Carnitas
Chicken Mole
