Possible to define HMTL file as table structure with content separate?

[jonathan_phang]

Hello,

I'll elaborate on the title a little. I need to produce a logging file for an application that I'm doing and it has to take the form of a HTML file. Is there a way that I can define a general table structure, ie. the standard table, header tags etc, then actually define the content that populates the table at the end of the file?

I'm using C# btw and I only ask because I want to just keep appending to the file and the new data to get added into the table, without the need to remove all the closing tags and then rewrite them again.

I'm sure that this is possible, but if any HTML whizzkids are out there, any help would be appreciate.

Jonny

PS (Yes, the title was meant to say HTML...)

[directhex]

not with raw html, no.

[TheAnimus]

the easy yet nicest way, would be with XSLT.

You produce an XML structure with your data (piss easy).

You 'transofrm' that XML into HTML.

so you have a class like

public class FOO { 
public string Feild1 {get;set;}
public string Feild2 {get;set;}
}

you then serialize that, with the XML seriealizer, but we don't want to write it to a file, so we do it to a stirng.

            
// serialize data to xml string.
            StringBuilder xmlsb = new StringBuilder();
            XmlWriter xmlWriter = XmlWriter.Create(xmlsb);
            XmlSerializer xmlSerializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof (FOO[]));
// an array of FOO.
            xmlSerializer.Serialize(xmlWriter, new FOO[] {foo1,foo2});

Then we load the compiled Transform.

            XslCompiledTransform t = new XslCompiledTransform(false);
            t.Load(@"report.xslt");

            TextReader tr = new StringReader(xmlsb.ToString());
            XmlReader xmlR = XmlReader.Create(tr);
            StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
            XmlWriter xmlW = XmlWriter.Create(sb);
            t.Transform(xmlR, xmlW);
            xmlWriter.Close();

That expects an XSLT file called report.

your then left with a string builder (sb) that has the 'transformed' XML in HTML.

Its really easy to debug and maintain, plus going forward you have the XML which is always useful for interopping with other apps.