ASP.NET MVC Render Partial View to String

I have run into a situation where I would like to render a partial view to a string and then return it as part of a JSON response like so:

return Json(new {
    statusCode = 1,
    statusMessage = "The person has been added!",
    personHtml = PartialView("Person", person)
});

The ability to do something like this would open up a ton of amazing possibilities, so I really scoured the internet looking for a solution. Unfortunately, no one seems to have come up with a clean solution for it, so I dug into the MVC code and came up one…and because I’m such a nice guy, you get to copy it for free. 😉

public abstract class MyBaseController : Controller {

    protected string RenderPartialViewToString()
    {
        return RenderPartialViewToString(null, null);
    }

    protected string RenderPartialViewToString(string viewName)
    {
        return RenderPartialViewToString(viewName, null);
    }

    protected string RenderPartialViewToString(object model)
    {
        return RenderPartialViewToString(null, model);
    }

    protected string RenderPartialViewToString(string viewName, object model)
    {
        if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(viewName))
            viewName = ControllerContext.RouteData.GetRequiredString("action");

        ViewData.Model = model;

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

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

Now you can simply do this:

public class MyController : MyBaseController {

    public ActionResult CreatePerson(Person p) {
        if (ModelState.IsValid) {
            try {
                PersonRepository.Create(p);
                return Json(new {
                    statusCode = 1,
                    statusMessage = "The person has been added!",
                    personHtml = RenderPartialViewToString("Person", p)
                });
            }
            catch (Exception ex) {
                return Json(new {
                    statusCode = 0,
                    statusMessage = "Error: " + ex.Message
                });
            }
        }
        else
            return Json(new {
                statusCode = 0,
                statusMessage = "Invalid data!"
            });
    }
}

Also note that you can modify these functions to render a View (rather than a PartialView) with this small change:

ViewEngineResult viewResult = ViewEngines.Engines.FindView(ControllerContext, viewName);

Enjoy!