Question

I need to generate html (for the body of an email message) specific to a Customer object
I thought of making a View that gets a Customer object and renders the appropriate text.

Is there a way to call a view and get the rendered output without associating it to a controller action?

Ideally in pseydocode I would do something like this

customer = new Customer();
view = new GetCustomerEmailBodyView(customer);
string htmlBody = view.SomeFunctionToRenderViewAndGetOutput()

I have found a solution to get the HTML of a view here that has an action returning a StringResult (inherits from ViewResult) instead of ActionResult which exposes an Html property.
However I still have to make a custom action to call it, and I don’t like the fact that it depends on the ControllerContext making it hard to test it.

Is what I am requesting against the MVC principals? How should my code be structured for this scenario?

Answer 1

Original code from here

protected string RenderPartialViewToString(string viewName, object model) {
    if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(viewName))
        viewName = ControllerContext.RouteData.GetRequiredString("action");
    ViewData.Model = model;
    using (StringWriter sw = new StringWriter()) {
        ViewEngineResult viewResult = ViewEngines.Engines.FindPartialView(ControllerContext, viewName);
        ViewContext viewContext = new ViewContext(ControllerContext, viewResult.View, ViewData, TempData, sw);
        viewResult.View.Render(viewContext, sw);

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