What is the best way to create printable letters from an MVC application?

Question

What's the best way to create printable letters from an MVC application? I'm looking for sort of a mail merge thing from my app that prints a form letter with various values filled in.

In ASP.NET, I previously did this by creating an HTML document and displaying it as application/msword, but I did that with code-behind, which isn't an (easy) option in MVC, and I don't know if that's the best method or not.

Note that this is an internal application, so it can be assumed everyone has Word on their computer. With that said, it would be nice to bypass Word, but I could go either way. The simpler the better. Any ideas/methods welcome.

Answer 1

Since this is just HTML with the ContentType set to application/msword I can't see any reason why you would want to use code-behind.

A standard MVC view with a typical HTML template peppered with appropriate <%=...> where view data needs to be inserted would seem to be the sensible approach. Even where you might want to loop.

BTW, why isn't code-behind an easy option?

Answer 2

In your controller:

return Content(contentGoesHere, "application/msword");