Question

I have an app that only ever loads a full view one time. My reason for doing this is not important. What is important is that the rest of the content is only ever going to come back in partial views. In addition to some content I have some JSON objects I’d like to pass back and forth to and from the server with each AJAX request.

Is there a way to return a JSON object with a view as one of its properties? This would be extremely useful and would save on bandwidth as my current workaround is to make two ajax calls, one for the JSON and one for the partial view which not only takes more time and more bandwidth, but it also requires two separate action methods and some fancy tricks on the server side. Serializing a view into a JSON object would solve all my problems.

What is the best way to accomplish this and what downsides (if any) would there be to doing this?

Answer 1

Here’s an interesting tidbit of code that seems to do what I want and preserves model binding from what I can tell.

protected string RenderPartialViewToString(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.GetStringBuilder().ToString();
     }
}

Works like a charm. I just use this and pass the string as a JSON parameter and then on the client I read the parameter and drop it in it’s appropriate container. I’m very excited to have this working.