Render Partial to String in the Controller or elsewhere

Question

So basically I have a partial view which can build a nice table for me. I would like to email this table out every week to my users. Instead of having to basically copy the template again, I would like to forward my model to the controller and receive the corresponding generated HTML as a String.

Is it possible to do this in a Controller, I feel it should be a pretty simple process.

Answer 1

Put this into a Helper file:

public static string RenderViewToString(ControllerContext context, string viewName, object model)
        {
            if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(viewName))
                viewName = context.RouteData.GetRequiredString("action");

            ViewDataDictionary viewData = new ViewDataDictionary(model);

            using (StringWriter sw = new StringWriter())
            {
                ViewEngineResult viewResult = ViewEngines.Engines.FindPartialView(context, viewName);
                ViewContext viewContext = new ViewContext(context, viewResult.View, viewData, new TempDataDictionary(), sw);
                viewResult.View.Render(viewContext, sw);

                return sw.GetStringBuilder().ToString();
            }
        }

And then from the controller you can call it like this:

var order = orderService.GetOrder(id);

var orderPrint = MyHelper.RenderViewToString(this.ControllerContext, "_OrderView", order);