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Extending the Orchard Message Service

This journey begin in a somewhat normal way. I needed to allow a user in our Orchard instance to submit a form that would send an email to our ticketing system. I know, no API exists for the ticketing system and I had to use an old school way. After getting the initial implementation, we discovered that the email that was being sent was HTML and that HTML was supported, but a bug fix required emails to be in plain text. Not only that, but the information that gets parsed has to be the first content in the email. I was hit by a double whammy, my email was HTML and the template that was getting applied to the email was our theme template. So couple different items came out of this.

  • Templates in your theme override templates in your module.
  • The Message Service uses the EmailMessageChannel.
  • The EmailMessageChannel uses a specific template.
  • The EmailMessageChannel detects if the message contains HTML and sets it on the MailMessage.

These are good items to know, time to dig into the source code and determine what I needed to do to use my template or send an email as plain text. After a little digging around, I determined that I needed to create two classes, two interfaces, and two templates in my module. The first item I needed to create was an implementation of IMessageChannel for my new type of message channel.


using Orchard.Messaging.Services;

namespace Orchard.MyCustomModule.Services {
    public interface IPlainTextMessageChannel : IMessageChannel {
    }
}

With that created I need to create a concrete example of the message channel. I just copied the EmailMessageChannel found in the Orchard.Email module. I renamed the class PlainTextMessageChannel and implemented the interface. I then changed the message type to be PlainText, changed the default template to be Template_PlainText_Wrapper. Finally I set the IsBodyHtml to false as I wanted it to be plain text, not HTML.


namespace Orchard.MyCustomModule.Services {
    public class PlainTextMessageChannel : Component, IPlainTextMessageChannel, IDisposable {
        private readonly SmtpSettingsPart _smtpSettings;
        private readonly IShapeFactory _shapeFactory;
        private readonly IShapeDisplay _shapeDisplay;
        private readonly Lazy<SmtpClient> _smtpClientField;
        public static readonly string MessageType = "PlainText";
    
        public PlainTextMessageChannel(
            IOrchardServices orchardServices,
            IShapeFactory shapeFactory,
            IShapeDisplay shapeDisplay) {
            _shapeFactory = shapeFactory;
            _shapeDisplay = shapeDisplay;
            _smtpSettings = orchardServices.WorkContext.CurrentSite.As<SmtpSettingsPart>();
            _smtpClientField = new Lazy<SmtpClient>(CreateSmtpClient);
        }
         
        public void Dispose() {
            if (!_smtpClientField.IsValueCreated) {
                return;
            }
             
            _smtpClientField.Value.Dispose();
        }
              
        public void Process(IDictionary<string, object> parameters) {
            
            if (!_smtpSettings.IsValid()) {
                return;
            }
               
            var emailMessage = new EmailMessage {
                Body = Read(parameters, "Body"),
                Subject = Read(parameters, "Subject"),
                Recipients = Read(parameters, "Recipients"),
                ReplyTo = Read(parameters, "ReplyTo"),
                From = Read(parameters, "From"),
                Bcc = Read(parameters, "Bcc"),
                Cc = Read(parameters, "CC")
            };
                    
            if (emailMessage.Recipients.Length == 0) {
                Logger.Error("Plain text email message doesn't have any recipient");
                return;
            }
                 
            // Apply default Body alteration for PlainText Channel.
            var template = _shapeFactory.Create("Template_PlainText_Wrapper", Arguments.From(new {
                Content = new MvcHtmlString(emailMessage.Body)
            }));
    
            var mailMessage = new MailMessage {
                Subject = emailMessage.Subject,
                Body = _shapeDisplay.Display(template),
                IsBodyHtml = false
            };
    
            if (parameters.ContainsKey("Message")) {
                // A full message object is provided by the sender.
    
                var oldMessage = mailMessage;
                mailMessage = (MailMessage)parameters["Message"];
    
                if (String.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(mailMessage.Subject))
                    mailMessage.Subject = oldMessage.Subject;
    
                if (String.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(mailMessage.Body)) {
                    mailMessage.Body = oldMessage.Body;
                    mailMessage.IsBodyHtml = oldMessage.IsBodyHtml;
                }
            }
    
            try {
                foreach (var recipient in ParseRecipients(emailMessage.Recipients)) {
                    mailMessage.To.Add(new MailAddress(recipient));
                }
                if (!String.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(emailMessage.Cc)) {
                    foreach (var recipient in ParseRecipients(emailMessage.Cc)) {
                        mailMessage.CC.Add(new MailAddress(recipient));
                    }
                }
                if (!String.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(emailMessage.Bcc)) {
                    foreach (var recipient in ParseRecipients(emailMessage.Bcc)) {
                        mailMessage.Bcc.Add(new MailAddress(recipient));
                    }
                }
                if (!String.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(emailMessage.From)) {
                    mailMessage.From = new MailAddress(emailMessage.From);
                }
                else {
                    // Take 'From' address from site settings or web.config.
                    mailMessage.From = !String.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(_smtpSettings.Address)
                        ? new MailAddress(_smtpSettings.Address)
                        : new MailAddress(((SmtpSection)ConfigurationManager.GetSection("system.net/mailSettings/smtp")).From);
                }
                if (!String.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(emailMessage.ReplyTo)) {
                    foreach (var recipient in ParseRecipients(emailMessage.ReplyTo)) {
                        mailMessage.ReplyToList.Add(new MailAddress(recipient));
                    }
                }
                _smtpClientField.Value.Send(mailMessage);
            }
            catch (Exception e) {
                Logger.Error(e, "Could not send plain text email");
            }
        }
    
        private SmtpClient CreateSmtpClient() {
            // If no properties are set in the dashboard, use the web.config value.
            if (String.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(_smtpSettings.Host)) {
                return new SmtpClient(); 
            }
            var smtpClient = new SmtpClient {
                UseDefaultCredentials = _smtpSettings.RequireCredentials && _smtpSettings.UseDefaultCredentials
            };
            if (!smtpClient.UseDefaultCredentials && !String.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(_smtpSettings.UserName)) {
                smtpClient.Credentials = new NetworkCredential(_smtpSettings.UserName, _smtpSettings.Password);
            }
            if (_smtpSettings.Host != null) {
                smtpClient.Host = _smtpSettings.Host;
            }
            smtpClient.Port = _smtpSettings.Port;
            smtpClient.EnableSsl = _smtpSettings.EnableSsl;
            smtpClient.DeliveryMethod = SmtpDeliveryMethod.Network;
            return smtpClient;
        }
    
        private string Read(IDictionary<string, object> dictionary, string key) {
            return dictionary.ContainsKey(key) ? dictionary[key] as string : null;
        }
    
        private IEnumerable<string> ParseRecipients(string recipients) {
            return recipients.Split(new[] {',', ';'}, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries);
        }
    }
}

Now the last piece that needs to be done is implementing the channel selector that gets used by Orchard messaging to know which template to use. Again, I made sure to make the channel name PlainText and the only other item that I needed to changed was the messageType check and the priority level.


using Orchard;
using Orchard.Messaging.Services;

namespace Orchard.MyCustomModule.Services {
    public class DefaultPlainTextMessageChannelSelector : Component, IMessageChannelSelector {
        private readonly IWorkContextAccessor _workContextAccessor;
        public const string ChannelName = "PlainText";

        public DefaultPlainTextMessageChannelSelector(IWorkContextAccessor workContextAccessor) {
            _workContextAccessor = workContextAccessor;
        }

        public MessageChannelSelectorResult GetChannel(string messageType, object payload) {
            if (messageType == "PlainText") {
                var workContext = _workContextAccessor.GetContext();
                return new MessageChannelSelectorResult {
                    Priority = 49,
                    MessageChannel = () => workContext.Resolve<IPlainTextMessageChannel>()
                };
            }

            return null;
        }
    }
}

Now all that is left is creating the default template that you need in the Views folder to match the name of the template that you set in the PlainTextMessageChannel. To use the new message channel just pass PlainText as the message type and Orchard will wire up everything else.


_messageService.Send("PlainText", parameters);

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