Keyur Nathani

July 05, 2013

All Post

Generating rich text emails with PowerShell

In this post: Generating automatic emails with embedded-reports and link to uploaded csv
we explored sending emails and attachments with HTML tables. Now let’s have a look at alternating row colors in the HTML.

This function will be used later to inject CSS reference to alternating colors into the HTML Table:

Function Set-AlternatingRows {
     
    [CmdletBinding()]
    Param(
        [Parameter(Mandatory=$True,ValueFromPipeline=$True)]
        [string]$Line,
        
        [Parameter(Mandatory=$True)]
        [string]$CSSEvenClass,
        
        [Parameter(Mandatory=$True)]
        [string]$CSSOddClass
    )
    Begin {
        $ClassName = $CSSEvenClass
    }
    Process {
        If ($Line.Contains(""))
        {   $Line = $Line.Replace("","")
            If ($ClassName -eq $CSSEvenClass)
            {   $ClassName = $CSSOddClass
            }
            Else
            {   $ClassName = $CSSEvenClass
            }
        }
        Return $Line
    }
}

Let’s now define $a as the styles, including the style for alternating rows, which we will use when generating the HTML table:

$a = ""

In generating the HTML table, note the reference to the above function in the Pipeline:

$MyOutput = $table | ConvertTo-Html Title, Link, Author, Size, FileName, Modified -head $a -body "
$($rows.count) $($Header)
"  | Set-AlternatingRows -CSSEvenClass even -CSSOddClass odd | Convert-HTMLEscape

As a refresher, we use this function to handle HTML escaping so the HTML comes out delightfully formatted:

Function Convert-HTMLEscape {
<#
convert < and > to < and > It is assumed that these will be in pairs
#>
 
[cmdletbinding()]
 
Param (
[Parameter(Position=0,ValueFromPipeline=$True)]
[string[]]$Text
)
 
Process {
foreach ($item in $text) {
    if ($item -match "<") {
         
        (($item.Replace("<","<")).Replace(">",">")).Replace(""",'"')
     }
     else {
        #otherwise just write the line to the pipeline
        $item
     }
 }
} #close process
 
} #close function