Question

I’d like to make use of the Model Binding / Rendering capabilities of a Razor View to generate the HTML Body Content for an email I’m sending from my ASP.NET MVC Application.

Is there a way to render a view to a string instead of returning it as the ActionResult of a GET request?

To illustrate I’m looking for something that will do the following…

    public ActionResult SendEmail(int id)
    {
        EmailDetailsViewModel emailDetails = EmailDetailsViewModel().CreateEmailDetails(id);

        // THIS IS WHERE I NEED HELP...
        // I want to pass my ViewModel (emailDetails) to my View (EmailBodyRazorView) but instead of Rending that to the Response stream I want to capture the output and pass it to an email client.
        string htmlEmailBody = View("EmailBodyRazorView", emailDetails).ToString();

        // Once I have the htmlEmail body I'm good to go.  I've got a utilityt that will send the email for me.
        MyEmailUtility.SmtpSendEmail("[e-mail]", "Email Subject", htmlEmailBody);

        // Redirect another Action that will return a page to the user confirming the email was sent.
        return RedirectToAction("ConfirmationEmailWasSent");
    }

Answer 1

If you just need to render the view into a string try something like this:

public string ToHtml(string viewToRender, ViewDataDictionary viewData, ControllerContext controllerContext)
{
    var result = ViewEngines.Engines.FindView(controllerContext, viewToRender, null);

    using (var output = new StringWriter())
    {
        var viewContext = new ViewContext(controllerContext, result.View, viewData, controllerContext.Controller.TempData, output);
        result.View.Render(viewContext, output);
        result.ViewEngine.ReleaseView(controllerContext, result.View);

        return output.ToString();
    }
}

You’ll need to pass in the name of the view and the ViewData and ControllerContext from your controller action.