Clicktricity

Rendering a view or a partial to a string is a common problem, especially when you want to re-use your code and markup in a PDF or Email.  There are a number of semi-successful methods for achieving this across the internet.  The techniques outlined below are built on the excellent post from Kevin Craft at http://craftycodeblog.com/2010/05/15/asp-net-mvc-render-partial-view-to-string/ this has the advantage of being simple, straight forward and fully support embedded Html helpers.

Render Partial To String & Render Form To String

Define the following within a Controller base class:

public class BaseController : Controller
{
   protected string RenderPartialToString(string viewName, object model)
   {
      if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(viewName))
         viewName = ControllerContext.RouteData.GetRequiredString("action");

      ViewData.Model = model;
      using (StringWriter sw = new StringWriter())
      {
         ViewEngineResult viewResult = ViewEngines.Engines.FindPartialView(ControllerContext, viewName);
         validateViewResult(viewResult, viewName);
         ViewContext viewContext = new ViewContext(ControllerContext, viewResult.View, ViewData, TempData, sw);
         viewResult.View.Render(viewContext, sw);
         return sw.GetStringBuilder().ToString();
      }
   }

   protected string RenderViewToString(string viewName, object model, string masterName)
   {
      if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(viewName))
      viewName = ControllerContext.RouteData.GetRequiredString("action");
      ViewData.Model = model;
      using (StringWriter sw = new StringWriter())
      {
         ViewEngineResult viewResult = ViewEngines.Engines.FindView(ControllerContext, viewName, masterName);
         validateViewResult(viewResult, viewName);
         ViewContext viewContext = new ViewContext(ControllerContext, viewResult.View, ViewData, TempData, sw);
         viewResult.View.Render(viewContext, sw);
         return sw.GetStringBuilder().ToString();
      }
   }

   private static void validateViewResult(ViewEngineResult viewResult, string viewName)
   {
      if (viewResult.View != null)
      return;
      // wasn't found - construct error message
      StringBuilder locationsText = new StringBuilder();
      foreach (string location in viewResult.SearchedLocations)
      {
         locationsText.AppendLine();
         locationsText.Append(location);
      }
      throw new InvalidOperationException(String.Format("View {0} not found. Locations Searched: {1}", viewName, locationsText));
   }
}

Then, within your controller action methods you can use something similar to this:

string partial = RenderPartialToString("TestPartial", "This is my test partial");
string viewString = this. RenderViewToString("", null, "");