Converting a Generic List of Custom Objects & Property to a Formatted String List

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