Rendering a View to a String – Email Templates in MVC4

Hey everyone,

This is just a short post showing how to render views as strings. I’ve used this as a quick way to generate email templates. The logic to render a view as a string is as follows:

public static string RenderRazorViewToString(Controller controller, string viewName, string content)
        {
            controller.ViewBag.Content = content;

            using (var sw = new StringWriter())
            {
                var viewResult = ViewEngines.Engines.FindPartialView(controller.ControllerContext, viewName);
                var viewContext = new ViewContext(controller.ControllerContext, viewResult.View, controller.ViewData, controller.TempData, sw);
                viewResult.View.Render(viewContext, sw);
                viewResult.ViewEngine.ReleaseView(controller.ControllerContext, viewResult.View);

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

The Email Template: Views/Emails/DefaultTemplate

@{
    Layout = null;
}



    

    Easy Carts





    
    

        

            

                

                    

                        
                           
                            @ViewBag.Content                            
                        
                    
                
            
        
        

            

                
                    
                
            
        
    

In your controller:

public String TestEmail(String content)
        {
            Email email = new Email() {
                To = "lls@live.com.au",
                From = Email.Fields.From.NoReply,
                Body = content,
                Subject = "Test",
                TemplateName = @"~ViewsEmailsDefaultTemplate.cshtml",
                UseTemplate = true
            };
      
            email.SendEmail(this);
            
            db.Emails.Add(email);
            db.SaveChanges();

            return email.Body.ToString();
        }

If you looking to implement this with your emails, note that it builds on top of the email class we created back in this post: http://www.whatibroke.com/?p=963

If you’re just going to be using it directly within the controller, using the original code from over StackOverflow will probably be your best bet: http://stackoverflow.com/a/2759898/522859