I have an action that return a partialview and I want to render the action result to string, I tried lot of examples show on others threads about this subject, but all have the same behavior, executes de View but not the action, is this possible?
Example: 1) Action - Partial View to render to string
public PartialViewResult Email(string Subject, string Body)
{
ViewBag.Subject = Subject;
ViewBag.Body = Body;
ViewBag.ExtraData = Session["ExtraData"];
return PartialView();
}
2) Partial View
@{
Layout = null;
string Subject = (string)@ViewBag.Subject
string Body = (string)@ViewBag.Body
}
<html>
<head>
<title>@Subject</title>
</head>
<body style="margin:0px">
@Body
</body>
3) Controller class obtaining string action result
var emailHTML = RenderViewToString(ControllerContext, "Email", new string[] { subject, msg });
4) Helper method from stackoverflow thread
public static string RenderViewToString(ControllerContext context, string viewName, object model)
{
if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(viewName))
viewName = context.RouteData.GetRequiredString("action");
ViewDataDictionary viewData = new ViewDataDictionary(model);
using (StringWriter sw = new StringWriter())
{
ViewEngineResult viewResult = ViewEngines.Engines.FindPartialView(context, viewName);
ViewContext viewContext = new ViewContext(context, viewResult.View, viewData, new TempDataDictionary(), sw);
viewResult.View.Render(viewContext, sw);
return sw.GetStringBuilder().ToString();
}
}
If I debug the code, it goes directly to the View with no ViewBag data, and doesn't execute the Email Action method.
Any idea?
That helper is useful for rendering a view directly, but not an action. That is, is doesn't even call that action that you want it to call. Instead, that code just finds a view and renders it directly to a writer with the supplied model.
What we want to do is actually call the
Email()
PartialViewResult
and render that.Observe: