Can NHaml be used as a general purpose template engine? (outside of MVC)

Question

I've seen a lot of people that like using the NHaml View Engine in ASP.NET MVC, but I'm wondering if NHaml can be used as a general purpose templating engine in .NET ? I'd like to use NHaml from a Console application, or to generate HTML email templates, outside of the ASP MVC View Engine environment. Is this possible? I haven't found many code examples anywhere showing how to do this. Thanks!

Answer 1

Yes, it can be used without ASP.Net MVC. I use it for my own web server (but that doesn't mean that you HAVE to use it with web servers).

Check out how I use it here: http://webserver.codeplex.com/SourceControl/changeset/view/50874#671672

What you do in short is something like this:

TemplateEngine _templateEngine = new TemplateEngine();

// Add a type used in the template. Needed to that nhaml can find it when compiling the template
_templateEngine.Options.AddReferences(typeof (TypeInYourAssembly));

// base class for all templates
_templateEngine.Options.TemplateBaseType = typeof (BaseClassForTemplates);

//class providing content to the engine, should implement ITemplateContentProvider
_templateEngine.Options.TemplateContentProvider = this; 

// compile the template, 
CompiledTemplate template = _templateEngine.Compile(new List<string> {layoutName, viewPath},
                                                                typeof (TemplateImplementation));

//create a instance
var instance = (NHamlView)template.CreateInstance();

// provide the view data used by the template
instance.ViewData = viewData;

// render it into a text writer
instance.Render(writer);

Answer 2

Latest NHaml makes it easier:

    var te = XmlConfigurator.GetTemplateEngine("nhaml.config");

    var ct = te.GetCompiledTemplate(new FileViewSource(new FileInfo("period.nhaml")), typeof(Template));

    var template = ct.CreateTemplate();

    var viewData = new Dictionary<string,object>();

    template.ViewData = viewData;

    template.Render(writer);