MVC Return Partial View as JSON

Question

Is there a way to return an HTML string from rendering a partial as part of a JSON response from MVC?

    public ActionResult ReturnSpecialJsonIfInvalid(AwesomenessModel model)     {         if (ModelState.IsValid)         {             if(Request.IsAjaxRequest()                 return PartialView("NotEvil", model);             return View(model)         }         if(Request.IsAjaxRequest())         {             return Json(new { error=true, message = PartialView("Evil",model)});         }         return View(model);     } 

Answer 1

You can extract the html string from the PartialViewResult object, similar to the answer to this thread:

Render a view as a string

PartialViewResult and ViewResult both derive from ViewResultBase, so the same method should work on both.

Using the code from the thread above, you would be able to use:

public ActionResult ReturnSpecialJsonIfInvalid(AwesomenessModel model) {     if (ModelState.IsValid)     {         if(Request.IsAjaxRequest())             return PartialView("NotEvil", model);         return View(model)     }     if(Request.IsAjaxRequest())     {         return Json(new { error = true, message = RenderViewToString(PartialView("Evil", model))});     }     return View(model); } 

Answer 2

Instead of RenderViewToString I prefer a approach like

return Json(new { Url = Url.Action("Evil", model) }); 

then you can catch the result in your javascript and do something like

success: function(data) {     $.post(data.Url, function(partial) {          $('#IdOfDivToUpdate').html(partial);     }); }