Remove temporary files created by RazorEngine
RazorEngine tries hard to delete the temporary files it creates, but it's not always possible, especially, if running from default AppDomain. The solution provided by RazorEngine works fine on console application (deletes temporary files while exiting from Main method), however, it won't work if the app is run as a service.
RazorEngine is a templating engine built on top of Microsoft's Razor parsing engine. It allows us to use Razor syntax to build dynamic templates, for example, we can generate a email body using using dynamic data for a console application.
Mailchimp and similar product are great tool to create and send mail, however, options to send dynamic content is very limited. A company might want to send weekly plans to their customers based upon customers' subscriptions. In simple word, not all customers will get same content! This is not a big challenge in a web-application, however, if we are going to send the content as an email then it's a challenge.
This is where RazorEngine shines. It provides us the same benefit of Razor we use in our ASP.NET MVC to generate Views using cshtml files. RazorEngine uses same cshtml files to generate templates.
RazorEngine is itself a blog topic. Therefore, I am not going to talk in detail about it. I am only going to address one of the few challenges using RazorEngine.
However, many of us has observed that it's difficult to delete the temporary files created by RazorEngine. A simple solution provided by the author of RazorEngine works fine with console application. It let's use a proxy AppDomain and unload the proxy domain before exiting, thereby, cleaning all the temporary files.
static int Main(string[] args)
{
if (AppDomain.CurrentDomain.IsDefaultAppDomain())
{
// RazorEngine cannot clean up from the default appdomain...
Console.WriteLine("Switching to secound AppDomain, for RazorEngine...");
AppDomainSetup adSetup = new AppDomainSetup();
adSetup.ApplicationBase = AppDomain.CurrentDomain.SetupInformation.ApplicationBase;
var current = AppDomain.CurrentDomain;
// You only need to add strongnames when your appdomain is not a full trust environment.
var strongNames = new StrongName[0];
var domain = AppDomain.CreateDomain(
"MyMainDomain", null,
current.SetupInformation, new PermissionSet(PermissionState.Unrestricted),
strongNames);
var exitCode = domain.ExecuteAssembly(Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().Location);
// RazorEngine will cleanup.
AppDomain.Unload(domain);
return exitCode;
}
// Continue with your code.
}
Without above code, we will encounter a familiar warning from the RazorEngine in the console.
RazorEngine: We can't cleanup temp files if you use RazorEngine on the default Appdomain.
Create a new Appdomain and use RazorEngine from there.
...text removed for brevity....
Please clean 'c:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Temp\RazorEngine_5me4r4xf.1on' manually!
The above warning gives us a hint regarding possible solution. One of the solution is mentioned above. However, we need to find another solution if we are going to use RazorEngine as a Windows service. The solution still would be to use a proxy domain to parse the email and unloading when it is done.
We can use MarshalByRefObject. It is the base class for objects that are marshalled by reference across Appdomain boundaries1. In simple word, it supports to access objects between two Appdomains.
Create a class to inherits MarshalByRefObject
public class MarshalByRefTypeInService:MarshalByRefObject
{
public string CreateMailBodyInSeparateAppDomain()
{
return ParseEmail.MakeEmailBody();
}
}
Create another Appdomain and access the method
AppDomainSetup domainSetup = new AppDomainSetup();
var executeAssembly = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().FullName;
domainSetup.ApplicationBase = AppDomain.CurrentDomain.BaseDirectory;
domainSetup.ConfigurationFile = AppDomain.CurrentDomain.SetupInformation.ConfigurationFile;
string proxyAppDomainName = $"RazorEngineProxyDomain-{Guid.NewGuid()}";
//Create wrapper AppDomain
AppDomain wrapperAppDomain = AppDomain.CreateDomain(proxyAppDomainName, null, domainSetup);
//MarshbyRefType proxy
MarshalByRefTypeInService byRefType = (MarshalByRefTypeInService)wrapperAppDomain.CreateInstanceAndUnwrap(executeAssembly, typeof(MarshalByRefTypeInService).FullName);
var body = byRefType.CreateMailBodyInSeparateAppDomain();
AppDomain.Unload(wrapperAppDomain);
Remember to Serialize the objects if, objects need to be passed as parameter while accessing the remote method as we are working, now, across different domains.
Source code can be found here