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Generating alternate colors in an email HTML table generated by PowerShell in SharePoint

Blogs / Generating alternate colors in an email HTML table generated by PowerShell in SharePoint

Joel Plaut

July 05, 2013

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Table of Contents

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 = "
<style>"
$a = $a + "TABLE{border-width: 1px;border-style: solid;border-color:black;}"
$a = $a + "Table{background-color:#EFFFFF;border-collapse: collapse;}"
$a = $a + "TH{border-width:1px;padding:5px;border-style:solid;border-color:black;background-color:#DDDDDD}"
$a = $a + "TD{border-width:1px;padding-left:5px;padding-right:3px;border-style:solid;border-color:black;}"
$a = $a + ".odd { background-color:#ccddee; }"
$a = $a + ".even { background-color:#eeeeff; }"
$a = $a + "</style>

”

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

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