Display contents of Text File in MVC3 Razor

Question

I am trying to display contents of a text file in a view. So far I have been able to get the following code for the controller:

public ActionResult ShowFile()     
{         
     string filepath = Server.MapPath("\\some unc path\\TextFile1.txt");
     var stream = new StreamReader(filepath);         
     return File(stream.ReadToEnd(), "text/plain");      
} 

I do not know how to go ahead with the view.

Kindly advise.

Answer 1

Return Content(yourText) not a file result. That is for file downloads. If you want to set it in a view with other data as well then create a viewmodel class and assign your text to a property in the model.

Answer 2

Well, you could return Content instead, and it will render whatever you put in directly to the response stream, with the response type of text/plain.

Then you don't even need a View.

Also don't forget about disposing of your resources and exception handling. You don't want to put the stream.ReadToEnd() in the return call.

Do it like this:

[HttpGet]
public ActionResult ShowFile() {         
     string filepath = Server.MapPath("\\some unc path\\TextFile1.txt");
     string content = string.Empty;

     try {
        using (var stream = new StreamReader(filepath)) {
          content = stream.ReadToEnd();
        }
     }
     catch (Exception exc) {
       return Content("Uh oh!");
     } 

     return Content(content);
}