Question

I have an ActionResult in my controller that I want to send an HTML email from, the body of that email is generated by a view. Rather than having 2 actionresults methods in my controller can I just get the result of the view when passed my model and avoid it being sent to the browser?

Answer 1

MvcMailer is a brilliant little project that supports generating emails using MVC views. It is available as a NuGet package.

In order to render a view to a string instead of response use this code (relativePath points to your view file):

        var content = string.Empty;
        var view = ViewEngines.Engines.FindView(ControllerContext, relativePath, null);
        using (var writer = new StringWriter())
        {
            var context = new ViewContext(ControllerContext, view.View, ViewData, TempData, writer);
            view.View.Render(context, writer);
            writer.Flush();
            content = writer.ToString();
        }