Getting a Partial View's HTML from inside of the controller
This is a solution that is working with ASP.Net MVC 1.0 (many that claim to work with beta 3 don't work with 1.0), doesn't suffer of the 'Server cannot set content type after HTTP headers have been sent' problem and can be called from within a controller (not only a view):
/// <summary>
/// Render a view into a string. It's a hack, it may fail badly.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="name">Name of the view, that is, its path.</param>
/// <param name="data">Data to pass to the view, a model or something like that.</param>
/// <returns>A string with the (HTML of) view.</returns>
public static string RenderPartialToString(string controlName, object viewData) {
ViewPage viewPage = new ViewPage() { ViewContext = new ViewContext() };
viewPage.Url = GetBogusUrlHelper();
viewPage.ViewData = new ViewDataDictionary(viewData);
viewPage.Controls.Add(viewPage.LoadControl(controlName));
StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
using (StringWriter sw = new StringWriter(sb)) {
using (HtmlTextWriter tw = new HtmlTextWriter(sw)) {
viewPage.RenderControl(tw);
}
}
return sb.ToString();
}
public static UrlHelper GetBogusUrlHelper() {
var httpContext = HttpContext.Current;
if (httpContext == null) {
var request = new HttpRequest("/", Config.Url.ToString(), "");
var response = new HttpResponse(new StringWriter());
httpContext = new HttpContext(request, response);
}
var httpContextBase = new HttpContextWrapper(httpContext);
var routeData = new RouteData();
var requestContext = new RequestContext(httpContextBase, routeData);
return new UrlHelper(requestContext);
}
It's a static method you can drop somewhere you find it convenient. You can call it this way:
string view = RenderPartialToString("~/Views/Controller/AView.ascx", someModelObject);
I put together a rough framework which allows you to render views to a string from a controller method in MVC Beta. This should help solve this limitation for now.
Additionally, I also put together a Rails-like RJS javascript generating framework for MVC Beta.
Check it out at http://www.brightmix.com/blog/how-to-renderpartial-to-string-in-asp-net-mvc and let me know what you think.
You would create your action like this:
public PartialViewResult LoginForm()
{
var model = // get model data from somewhere
return PartialView(model);
}
And the action would return the rendered partial view to your jquery response.
Your jquery could look something like this:
$('#targetdiv').load('/MyController/LoginForm',function(){alert('complete!');});