ASP.NET MVC Using Render Partial from Within an Html Helper

Question

I have an HtmlHelper extension that currently returns a string using a string builder and a fair amount of complex logic. I now want to add something extra to it that is taken from a render partial call, something like this ...

public static string MyHelper(this HtmlHelper helper) {     StringBuilder builder = new StringBuilder();     builder.Append("Hi There");     builder.Append(RenderPartial("MyPartialView"));     builder.Append("Bye!");     return builder.ToString(); } 

Now of course RenderPartial renders directly to the response so this doesn;t work and I've tried several solutions for rendering partials to strings but the all seem to fall over one I use the HtmlHelper within that partial.

Is this possible?

Answer 1

Because this question, although old and marked answered, showed up in google, I'm going to give a different answer.

In asp.net mvc 2 and 3, there's an Html.Partial(...) method that works like RenderPartial but returns the partial view as a string instead of rendering it directly.

Your example thus becomes:

//using System.Web.Mvc.Html; public static string MyHelper(this HtmlHelper helper) {     StringBuilder builder = new StringBuilder();     builder.Append("Hi There");     builder.Append(helper.Partial("MyPartialView"));     builder.Append("Bye!");     return builder.ToString(); }