Razor engine cant find view

Question

I'm trying to render a HTML from a view without using a web request. I need the HTML as a string, internally, I do not wish to serve it.

The viewEngine.FindView() returns a viewEnineResult that shows no view was found. It shows to search locations where it looked they look like this:

/Views//PDFOperationsReportView.cshtml

/Views/Shared/PDFOperationsReportView.cshtml

(Observe the double forward slash in the first line)

File structure (I placed it into a HTML snippet cause I couldn't manage to format the text properly in this editor)

Project 
      Folder 
        Subfolder
            CodeFile.cs
      Views
        PDFOperationsReportView.cshtml

The code:

var viewName = "PDFOperationsReportView";
var actionContext = GetActionContext();
var viewEngineResult = _viewEngine.FindView(actionContext, viewName, false);
if (!viewEngineResult.Success)
{
    throw new InvalidOperationException(string.Format("Couldn't find view '{0}'", viewName));
}
            
var view = viewEngineResult.View;

Answer 1

I had the same issue. I found the answer here: GitHub aspnet/Mvc Issue #4936

Basically, use GetView instead of FindView, like this:

var viewResult = razorViewEngine.GetView(viewName, viewName, false);

Your viewName needs to be a full path for this to work. For example:

1. /Views/Shared/PDFOperationsReportView.cshtml
2. ~/Pages/Shared/_Article.cshtml
3. ~/Areas/CM/Pages/_Article.cshtml