Blog

A while ago, I wrote a post that showed how you would Render a Partial View As A String. But what if you had a Partial View and wanted to output its action to a string?

Just like the majority of all other coding problems I encounter, StackOverflow always has the answer. In this case, a clever guy posted this piece of code:

var sw = new StringWriter();
PartialViewResult result = Email("Subject", "Body");

result.View = ViewEngines.Engines.FindPartialView(ControllerContext, "Email").View;

ViewContext vc = new ViewContext(ControllerContext, result.View, result.ViewData, result.TempData, sw);

result.View.Render(vc, sw);

var html = sw.GetStringBuilder().ToString();

Works well enough. However, I didn't like the thought of having to add all this code inside my controller, especially when I have to output many Partial View actions to a string. So I created an extension method:

/// <summary>
/// Renders a Partial View Action to string.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="controller">Controller to extend</param>
/// <param name="partialView">PartialView to render</param>
/// <param name="partialViewName">Name of Partial View</param>
/// <returns>Renders Partial View as a string</returns>
public static string RenderActionToString(this Controller controller, PartialViewResult partialView, string partialViewName)
{
    using (var sw = new StringWriter())
    {
        partialView.View = ViewEngines.Engines.FindPartialView(controller.ControllerContext, partialViewName).View;

        ViewContext vc = new ViewContext(controller.ControllerContext, partialView.View, partialView.ViewData,
            partialView.TempData, sw);

        partialView.View.Render(vc, sw);

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

This extension method can be used in the following way:

//Access PollController class.
PollController pc = new PollController();

//Get the LatestPoll PartialView action and output to string.
string myPartialView = this.RenderActionToString(pc.LatestPoll(), "../Poll/_LatestPoll");

Much cleaner!