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 works for me:

public virtual string RenderView(ViewContext viewContext)
{
    var response = viewContext.HttpContext.Response;
    response.Flush();
    var oldFilter = response.Filter;
    Stream filter = null;
    try
    {
        filter = new MemoryStream();
        response.Filter = filter;
        viewContext.View.Render(viewContext, viewContext.HttpContext.Response.Output);
        response.Flush();
        filter.Position = 0;
        var reader = new StreamReader(filter, response.ContentEncoding);
        return reader.ReadToEnd();
    }
    finally
    {
        if (filter != null)
        {
            filter.Dispose();
        }
        response.Filter = oldFilter;
    }
}

Answer 2

I am using MVC 1.0 RTM and none of the above solutions worked for me. But this one did:

Public Function RenderView(ByVal viewContext As ViewContext) As String

    Dim html As String = ""

    Dim response As HttpResponse = HttpContext.Current.Response

    Using tempWriter As New System.IO.StringWriter()

        Dim privateMethod As MethodInfo = response.GetType().GetMethod("SwitchWriter", BindingFlags.NonPublic Or BindingFlags.Instance)

        Dim currentWriter As Object = privateMethod.Invoke(response, BindingFlags.NonPublic Or BindingFlags.Instance Or BindingFlags.InvokeMethod, Nothing, New Object() {tempWriter}, Nothing)

        Try
            viewContext.View.Render(viewContext, Nothing)
            html = tempWriter.ToString()
        Finally
            privateMethod.Invoke(response, BindingFlags.NonPublic Or BindingFlags.Instance Or BindingFlags.InvokeMethod, Nothing, New Object() {currentWriter}, Nothing)
        End Try

    End Using

    Return html

End Function

Answer 3

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:

    /// <summary>
    /// Enables processing of HTTP Web requests asynchronously by a custom HttpHandler that implements the IHttpHandler interface.
    /// </summary>
    /// <param name="context">An HttpContext object that provides references to the intrinsic server objects.</param>
    /// <returns>The task to complete the http request.</returns>
    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());
        }
    }