Load an HTML template and to email

Question

I'd like to send a formatted HTML email from a custom component. I thought I would be able to create a tmpl file somewhere like components/mycomponent/views/emailer/tmpl/default_email.php and then in the view (at components/mycomponent/views/emailer/view.email.php) I'd be able to render the default_email view with the data pulled from the model and then send it.

It appears the "normal" Joomla way is to do a sprintf with a language string to generate the email.

Is there no way to render the template file in the view prior to sending the email?

Answer 1

Yes, there are several ways to render internally a page from a view.

Basically, you call the view and capture the output in a variable.

For instance, in FoF you can do it in this way:

    ob_start();
    F0FDispatcher::getTmpInstance(
            'com_mycomponent',
            'theview',
            $config
        )->dispatch();
    $output = ob_get_contents();
    ob_end_clean();

You can also call the Url with a cURL connection, but it is slower since you must open a new network connection to render the page.