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

To render a view to a string in the Service Layer without having to pass ControllerContext around, there is a good Rick Strahl article here http://www.codemag.com/Article/1312081 that creates a generic controller. Code summary below:

// Some Static Class
public static string RenderViewToString(ControllerContext context, string viewPath, object model = null, bool partial = false)
{
    // first find the ViewEngine for this view
    ViewEngineResult viewEngineResult = null;
    if (partial)
        viewEngineResult = ViewEngines.Engines.FindPartialView(context, viewPath);
    else
        viewEngineResult = ViewEngines.Engines.FindView(context, viewPath, null);

    if (viewEngineResult == null)
        throw new FileNotFoundException("View cannot be found.");

    // get the view and attach the model to view data
    var view = viewEngineResult.View;
    context.Controller.ViewData.Model = model;

    string result = null;

    using (var sw = new StringWriter())
    {
        var ctx = new ViewContext(context, view, context.Controller.ViewData, context.Controller.TempData, sw);
        view.Render(ctx, sw);
        result = sw.ToString();
    }

    return result;
}

// In the Service Class
public class GenericController : Controller
{ }

public static T CreateController(RouteData routeData = null) where T : Controller, new()
{
    // create a disconnected controller instance
    T controller = new T();

    // get context wrapper from HttpContext if available
    HttpContextBase wrapper;
    if (System.Web.HttpContext.Current != null)
        wrapper = new HttpContextWrapper(System.Web.HttpContext.Current);
    else
        throw new InvalidOperationException("Cannot create Controller Context if no active HttpContext instance is available.");

    if (routeData == null)
        routeData = new RouteData();

    // add the controller routing if not existing
    if (!routeData.Values.ContainsKey("controller") &&
        !routeData.Values.ContainsKey("Controller"))
        routeData.Values.Add("controller", controller.GetType().Name.ToLower().Replace("controller", ""));

    controller.ControllerContext = new ControllerContext(wrapper, routeData, controller);
    return controller;
}

Then to render the View in the Service class:

var stringView = RenderViewToString(CreateController().ControllerContext, "~/Path/To/View/Location/_viewName.cshtml", theViewModel, true);