Get html from MVC 4 view into a string

Question

I am trying to use the accepted answer from this question.

It seems that it will be exactly what i am looking for, but i have a problem. I don\'t know how to actuall

Answer 1

This is pretty much a copy of dav_i's post except that you have a model with strong typing and also the ability of producing partial views:

Rather than inherit Controller which means you have to remember to implement this every time, or inherit from a CustomControllerBase, which means you have to remember to inherit every time - simply make an extension method:

public static class ControllerExtensions
{
    public static string RenderView(this Controller controller, string viewName, TModel model, bool partial = false)
    {
        var controllerContext = controller.ControllerContext;
        controllerContext.Controller.ViewData.Model = model;

        // To be or not to be (partial)
        var viewResult = partial ? ViewEngines.Engines.FindPartialView(controllerContext, viewName) : ViewEngines.Engines.FindView(controllerContext, viewName, null);

        StringWriter stringWriter;

        using (stringWriter = new StringWriter())
        {
            var viewContext = new ViewContext(
                controllerContext,
                viewResult.View,
                controllerContext.Controller.ViewData,
                controllerContext.Controller.TempData,
                stringWriter);

            viewResult.View.Render(viewContext, stringWriter);
            viewResult.ViewEngine.ReleaseView(controllerContext, viewResult.View);
        }

        return stringWriter.ToString();
    }
}

Then within your Controller you can call like this (for a full view):

this.RenderView("ViewName", model);

That means you will get the doctype and the HTML element etc too. For partial view use:

this.RenderView("ViewName", model, true);