There was a question in the discussion group about using Spark as a simple text templating engine for creating email bodies like you can do with Velocity. Maybe they meant NVelocity?

In any case I put together a small console sample to verify the use case that I thought I would share here. It shows a few of the ways you can micro-manage how the Spark engine works by providing a specific base page and replacing the IViewFolder abstraction.

using System;
using Spark;
using Spark.FileSystem;

public class User
{
    public int Id { get; set; }
    public string Name { get; set; }
}

public abstract class EmailView : AbstractSparkView
{
    public User user { get; set; }
}

class Program
{
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        // following are one-time steps

        // create engine
        var settings = new SparkSettings()
            .SetPageBaseType(typeof(EmailView));

        var templates = new InMemoryViewFolder();
        var engine = new SparkViewEngine(settings)
                     {
                         ViewFolder = templates
                     };

        // add templates
        templates.Add("sample.spark", @"
Dear ${user.Name},

This is an email.

Sincerely,
Spark View Engine

http://constanto.org/unsubscribe/${user.Id}

");

        // following are per-render steps

        // render template
        var descriptor = new SparkViewDescriptor()
            .AddTemplate("sample.spark");

        var view = (EmailView)engine.CreateInstance(descriptor);
        view.user = new User { Id = 655321, Name = "Alex" };
        view.RenderView(Console.Out);
        Console.ReadLine();
    }
}