Rendering a view on-the-fly

Question

I'm developing an ASP.NET MVC application that will send the user a confirmation email. For the email itself, I'd like to create a view and then render that view and send it using the .NET mail objects.

How can I do this using the MVC framework?

Answer 1

You basically need to use IView.Render. You can get the view by using ViewEngineCollection.FindView (ViewEngines.Engines.FindView for the defaults). Render the output to a TextWriter and make sure you call ViewEngine.ReleaseView afterwards. Sample code below (untested):

StringWriter output = new StringWriter();

string viewName = "Email";
string masterName = "";

ViewEngineResult result = ViewEngines.Engines.FindView(ControllerContext, viewName, masterName);

ViewContext viewContext = new ViewContext(ControllerContext, result.View, viewData, tempData);
result.View.Render(viewContext, output);

result.ViewEngine.ReleaseView(ControllerContext, result.View);

string viewOutput = output.ToString();

I'll leave viewData / tempData to you.

Answer 2

As per my comment on Richard's answer, this code did work, but it always resulted in a 'Cannot redirect after HTTP headers have been sent' error.

After a lot of digging around Google and being frustrated, I finally found some code that seems to do the trick, on this article:

http://mikehadlow.blogspot.com/2008/06/mvc-framework-capturing-output-of-view%5F05.html

This guy's method is to create his own HttpContext.

Rather than use the MVCContrib BlockRenderer I simply replace the current HttpContext with a new one that hosts a Response that writes to a StringWriter.

This method works perfectly (a minor difference is that I had to create a separate Action for rendering my partial view, but no drama there).