Email Builder Laravel - php

Question

I'm using Laravel 5.3 to build an application which allows admins to build template emails to be used within the system for email address verification, forgot password etc. The template emails are built using a form which creates a new record in the database. Once the templates have been created they can be used within the application using the following command
Mail::to($user)->queue(new MailEmailTemplate($emailtemplate, $user));
where $emailtemplate is a model with the following fillable fields (there is nothing else worth disclosing within the model)
$fillable = ['from_name', 'from_email','subject','body','email_type','status'];
In order to allow the emails to be personalised to the user which they are being sent to (i.e. 'Dear John' at the top of the email body) I need to allow admins to enter variables into the form.
An example of how the form body should be filled out by the system admins:
Dear {{$user->first_name}}
Image of the form that admins will use to create the email template
The problem I am having is when the emails are sent the variables are not injected into the HTML sent to the client. i.e in the example above the recipient receives the email without the variables inserted
Dear {{$user->first_name}} as opposed to Dear John.
I have added the following route in my app/routes/web.php file
Route::get('/email_templates/{emailtemplate}/send/{user}', 'emailTemplatesController#send')->name('email_templates.send');
my App/Http/Controllers/emailTemplatesController.php
...
use App\Mail\MailEmailTemplate;
class EmailTemplatesController extends Controller
{
...
public function send(EmailTemplate $emailtemplate, User $user)
{
Mail::to($user)->queue(new MailEmailTemplate($emailtemplate, $user));
return back();
}
}
my app/Mail/MailEmailTemplate.php Mailable
use App\Models\User;
use App\Models\EmailTemplate;
use Session;
class MailEmailTemplate extends Mailable
{
use Queueable, SerializesModels;
public $user;
public $emailtemplate;
public function __construct(EmailTemplate $emailtemplate, User $user)
{
$this->emailtemplate = $emailtemplate;
$this->user = $user;
}
public function build()
{
$data['user'] = $this->user;
$data['email_template'] = $this->emailtemplate;
return $this->subject('testing')
->view('emails.index')
->with($data);
}
}
and finally the resources/views/emails/index.blade.php file (which is used to dislpay the email to the recipient)
{!! $email_template->body !!}
I've used unescaped output here as the text that is stored in the body field is HTML (admins will be developing the email template as a laravel 'view' in a text editor (phpStorm) then copy the code from the view into the form field for the body to store it within the application).
How can I modify this to allow the variables from the $user object to be inserted in place of the variables specified in the $emailtemplate->body?
If I modify the resources/views/emails/index.blade.php to the following the correct output can be achieved
{!! str_replace('<<$user->first_name>>',$user->first_name, $email_template->body)!!}
however this method is inefficient as it would require a str_replace to be used for any variable to be used within the emails. Note I've had to use << >> tags in the $email_template->body to prevent a parse error.
Update:
Could variable variables be used in conjunction with a regex to find every instance of {{ }} tags inside the $email_template->body and treat the text contained inside as a variable variable?
I apologise for the long question - I am relatively new to Laravel and wanted to make sure you guys could scrutinise my code structure.
Appreciate your help.
Jordan

Answer 1

try using
{{$email_template->body}}