In MVC3 Razor, how do I get the html of a rendered view inside an action?

Question

Does anybody know how to get the generated html of a view inside an action?

Is it something like this:

public ActionResult Do() {     var html = RenderView("hello", model); ... } 

Answer 1

I use a static method in a class I called Utilities.Common I pass views back to the client as properties of JSON objects constantly so I had a need to render them to a string. Here ya go:

public static string RenderPartialViewToString(Controller controller, string viewName, object model) {     controller.ViewData.Model = model;     using (StringWriter sw = new StringWriter())     {         ViewEngineResult viewResult = ViewEngines.Engines.FindPartialView(controller.ControllerContext, viewName);         ViewContext viewContext = new ViewContext(controller.ControllerContext, viewResult.View, controller.ViewData, controller.TempData, sw);         viewResult.View.Render(viewContext, sw);          return sw.ToString();     } } 

This will work for full views as well as partial views, just change ViewEngines.Engines.FindPartialView to ViewEngines.Engines.FindView.

Answer 2

The accepted answer by @Chev above is good, but I wanted to render the result of a specific action, not just a particular view.

Also, I needed to be able to pass parameters to that action rather than rely on injecting a model.

So I came up with my own method, that I put in the base class of my controllers (making it available to them all):

    protected string RenderViewResultAsString(ViewResult viewResult)     {         using (var stringWriter = new StringWriter())         {             this.RenderViewResult(viewResult, stringWriter);              return stringWriter.ToString();         }     }      protected void RenderViewResult(ViewResult viewResult, TextWriter textWriter)     {         var viewEngineResult = this.ViewEngineCollection.FindView(             this.ControllerContext,              viewResult.ViewName,              viewResult.MasterName);         var view = viewEngineResult.View;          try         {             var viewContext = new ViewContext(                 this.ControllerContext,                  view,                  this.ViewData,                  this.TempData,                  textWriter);              view.Render(viewContext, textWriter);         }         finally         {             viewEngineResult.ViewEngine.ReleaseView(this.ControllerContext, view);         }     } 

Suppose I have an action called Foo that takes a model object and some other parameters, which together influence what view will be used:

    public ViewResult Foo(MyModel model, int bar)     {         if (bar == 1)             return this.View("Bar1");         else             return this.View("Bar2", model);     } 

Now, if I want to get the result of calling action Foo, I can simply get the ViewResult by invoking the Foo method, and then call RenderViewResultAsString to get the HTML text:

    var viewResult = this.Foo(model, bar);      var html = this.RenderViewResultAsString(viewResult);