WebMessage and HTML Template Parser

The aim of these simple classes is to take a standard HTML page containing some ‘parse-able tags’ and use this to display messages to the user in the websites look and feel.
There is a number of ways to achieve this, but having a standard HTML web page template which contains these ‘tags’ is useful for a number of reasons;

1. It is very easy to loose hidden code segments from server side pages when editing them, especially when copying and pasting sections to and from other pages.
2. It allows some abstraction between code and the website pages. This keeps the HTML pages ‘clean’, which I for one find preferable. The ‘tags’ are plain text and are visible in the style and context of the page, unlike hidden code.
3. This parsed HTML template system works well in split technology applications due to simplicity of the implementation in different languages.

TemplateHTML Class

The TemplateHTML class allows you pair the tags that you wish to replace in the parse process using a method called ‘AddTagPair’.
The parse process is run by using either ‘OutputTemplate’ or ‘UseTemplate’, the first takes a file and parses its contents and sticks it out as the Response, and the later parses a named file and returns the whole file as a String.

TemplateHTML templateParser = new TemplateHTML(); 
         
// AddTagPair( TAG TEXT, TEXT TO REPLACE TAG WITH)
templateParser.AddTagPair( "[title]", "This is the web page title"); 
templateParser.AddTagPair( "[messagetitle]", "Subject Title");
       
// Perform the parse and output it to the browser 
templateParser.OutputTemplate( "template.html");

Article Continued below....

WebMessage Class

The WebMessage class is an attempt to produce a similar API to the MessageBox class. This wraps the functionality of the TemplateHTML class by providing a number of Show methods which parse a HTML file which is either named or set as a parameter in the web.config file.

This allows you to give the user a message in the style of your site by using a single line such as;

WebMessage.Show( this, "mytemplate.html", "Title", "This is a message");