ASP.NET MVC and text/xml content type

Question

I want to return a View() from an action, and the resulting response should have a content type of text/xml instead of the default text/html.

I have tried the following, with no success:

Response.Content = "text/xml"; 
return View();

I know that you can specify the content type by returning ContentResult, but that doesn't render my View.

I'm hoping I don't need to render the view to a string then use return Content(), so I'm probably overlooking some easy way.

Answer 1

Have you tried setting the response.content from the view's pre render method in the codebehind page? that's obviously assuming you're using the webform view engine

Answer 2

?:

<%@ Page Language="C#" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage" ContentType="text/xml" %>

Hope this helps

Answer 3

You need a view that doesn't override things and generate HTML, including its own context-type.

A custom view can directly render to Response.Write (see JsonResult in Reflector for a class that is very similar to what you would need).

To render XML without a intermediate string, save your XML to an XmlWriter created over Response.Output.