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

I found a better way to render razor view page when I got error with the methods above, this solution for both web form environment and mvc environment. No controller is needed.

Here is the code example, in this example I simulated a mvc action with an async http handler:

    /// 

    /// Enables processing of HTTP Web requests asynchronously by a custom HttpHandler that implements the IHttpHandler interface.
    /// 
    /// An HttpContext object that provides references to the intrinsic server objects.
    /// The task to complete the http request.
    protected override async Task ProcessRequestAsync(HttpContext context)
    {
        if (this._view == null)
        {
            this.OnError(context, new FileNotFoundException("Can not find the mvc view file.".Localize()));
            return;
        }
        object model = await this.LoadModelAsync(context);
        WebPageBase page = WebPageBase.CreateInstanceFromVirtualPath(this._view.VirtualPath);
        using (StringWriter sw = new StringWriter())
        {
            page.ExecutePageHierarchy(new WebPageContext(new HttpContextWrapper(context), page, model), sw);
            await context.Response.Output.WriteAsync(sw.GetStringBuilder().ToString());
        }
    }