Associate template to getMailer class

Question

I have created a custom form, after submit send email to recipient with JFactory::getMailer With this class can add body, for example:

$mailer = JFactory::getMailer();
$mailer->addRecipient('test-email@test.com');
$mailer->setBody('Hello world simple text');

In my case, my template email have many div, styles css, etc, and is pretty ugly include entire html into setBody method. Is there an alternative?

Answer 1

Within Joomla you could use JLayout.

$body = JLayoutHelper::render('path.to.layout');
$mailer->setBody($body);

If you have any variables you need to use in the layout, pass them as second argument:

$body = JLayoutHelper::render('path.to.layout', $displayData);

But because this is done for emails, you probably don't need JLayout features like template overrides. So you can use PHP's native ob_get_contents() to get output from PHP file. Internally JLayout works the same way.

ob_start();
include 'path/to/layout.php';
$body = ob_get_contents();
ob_end_clean();
$mailer->setBody($body);