Well another post about Spark, I’ve been spending a couple of hours with the library and I really like it. On one of my previous posts Byron Sommardahl asked if it was possible to use an anonymous object as the model of your Spark view. I proposed a solution but I didn’t really have an idea if it actually worked. Because I was curious if it would work I fired up Visual Studio.
I use Spark as engine to generate all sorts of HTML but on Monday last week that specific code snippet failed without being changed. Spark indicated that it could not find the view file, so I checked and double checked that the view was in the correct place. This was as it should be, but still Spark threw the exception that it could not find the view source file. I decided to try the same code on my laptop and there Spark still worked as it should, so the issue was related to my development machine configuration.
I can't remember a project which I worked on that didn't have a requirement which included sending out emails. Most of the time the templates that are needed for these emails are so small that a simple text file with some wildcards does the trick. It does the trick but nothing more. It's hardly an elegant solution and there is no support to loop through elements or do any other complicated stuff. I wanted a better, broader solution so I started to look around for usable libraries. I have been hearing a lot of good things of the Spark View Engine and wondered if it was possible to use it to generate html from a given template.