MVC 5 Render View to String

Question

It seems, most code for rendering view into string doesn\'t work in MVC 5.

I have latest MVC 5.1.2 templates and I am trying to render view into string.

Answer 1

I had an immediate need to return 6 partial views as strings in a JSON object. Instead of creating a static method, and passing all the unneeded parameters, I decided to add protected methods to our ControllerBase class that derives from Controller, and is used as the base class for all of our controllers.

Here is a fully functional ControllerBase class that provides this functionality, and works very similar to the PartialView() and View() methods that are in the Controller class. It includes the additions from @Alok.

public abstract class ControllerBase : Controller
{
    #region PartialViewToString

    protected string PartialViewToString(string partialViewName, object model = null)
    {
        ControllerContext controllerContext = new ControllerContext(Request.RequestContext, this);

        return ViewToString(
            controllerContext,
            ViewEngines.Engines.FindPartialView(controllerContext, partialViewName) ?? throw new FileNotFoundException("Partial view cannot be found."),
            model
        );
    }

    #endregion

    #region ViewToString

    protected string ViewToString(string viewName, object model = null)
    {
        ControllerContext controllerContext = new ControllerContext(Request.RequestContext, this);

        return ViewToString(
            controllerContext,
            ViewEngines.Engines.FindView(controllerContext, viewName, null) ?? throw new FileNotFoundException("View cannot be found."),
            model
        );
    }

    protected string ViewToString(string viewName, string controllerName, string areaName, object model = null)
    {
        RouteData routeData = new RouteData();
        routeData.Values.Add("controller", controllerName);

        if (areaName != null)
        {
            routeData.Values.Add("Area", areaName);
            routeData.DataTokens["area"] = areaName;
        }

        ControllerContext controllerContext = new ControllerContext(HttpContext, routeData, this);

        return ViewToString(
            controllerContext,
            ViewEngines.Engines.FindView(controllerContext, viewName, null) ?? throw new FileNotFoundException("View cannot be found."),
            model
        );
    }

    #endregion

    #region Private Methods

    private string ViewToString(ControllerContext controllerContext, ViewEngineResult viewEngineResult, object model)
    {
        using (StringWriter writer = new StringWriter())
        {
            ViewContext viewContext = new ViewContext(
                controllerContext,
                viewEngineResult.View,
                new ViewDataDictionary(model),
                new TempDataDictionary(),
                writer
            );

            viewEngineResult.View.Render(viewContext, writer);

            return writer.ToString();
        }
    }

    #endregion
}