How to render an ASP.NET MVC view as a string?

Question

I want to output two different views (one as a string that will be sent as an email), and the other the page displayed to a user.

Is this possible in ASP.NET MVC bet

Answer 1

This article describes how to render a View to a string in different scenarios:

1. MVC Controller calling another of its own ActionMethods
2. MVC Controller calling an ActionMethod of another MVC Controller
3. WebAPI Controller calling an ActionMethod of an MVC Controller

The solution/code is provided as a class called ViewRenderer. It is part of Rick Stahl's WestwindToolkit at GitHub.

Usage (3. - WebAPI example):

string html = ViewRenderer.RenderView("~/Areas/ReportDetail/Views/ReportDetail/Index.cshtml", ReportVM.Create(id));