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("stevejobs@apple.com", "Email Subject", htmlEmailBody);
// Redirect another Action that will return a page to the user confirming the email was sent.
return RedirectToAction("ConfirmationEmailWasSent");
}
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);
StringWriter output;
using (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.
You may checkout Postal for using views for sending emails.
Try MvcMailer:
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/aspnet/MvcMailerNuGet.aspx
Another one would be ActionMailer.Net: https://bitbucket.org/swaj/actionmailer.net/wiki/Home
From the website: An MVC 3-based port of the Rails ActionMailer library to ASP.NET MVC. The goal is to make it easy and relatively painless to send email from your application.
NuGet: Install-Package ActionMailer
There is also Essential Mail: Razor package from NuGet. It is build over RazorEngine and provides simple interface for email rendering.
Email message template looks something like
@inherits Essential.Templating.Razor.Email.EmailTemplate
@using System.Net;
@{
From = new MailAddress("example@email.com");
Subject = "Email Subject";
}
@section Html
{
<html>
<head>
<title>Example</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>HTML part of the email</h1>
</body>
</html>
}
@section Text
{
Text part of the email.
}
The project is hosted on GitHub: https://github.com/smolyakoff/essential-templating/wiki/Email-Template-with-Razor
Based on Ryan's answer, I did an extension method:
public static string RenderViewToString(this Controller source, string viewName)
{
var viewEngineResult = ViewEngines.Engines.FindView(source.ControllerContext, viewName, null);
using (StringWriter output = new StringWriter())
{
viewEngineResult.View.Render(new ViewContext(source.ControllerContext, viewEngineResult.View, source.ViewData, source.TempData, output), output);
viewEngineResult.ViewEngine.ReleaseView(source.ControllerContext, viewEngineResult.View);
return output.ToString();
}
}
To call from inside a controller action (example usage):
[AllowAnonymous]
public class ErrorController : Controller
{
// GET: Error
public ActionResult Index(System.Net.HttpStatusCode id)
{
Exception ex = null; // how do i get the exception that was thrown?
if (!Debugger.IsAttached)
Code.Email.Send(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["BugReportEmailAddress"],
$"Bug Report: AgentPortal: {ex?.Message}",
this.RenderViewToString("BugReport"));
Response.StatusCode = (int)id;
return View();
}
}