The Razor View Engine is very powerful, easy to use, and just overall great for binding data to HTML. But sometimes you need to render HTML for use in Emails, download pages, generate PDF’s, or other purposes, so it would be neat if you could use the Razor View Engine to generate those for you, and just give you the HTML to do with it as you wish. Luckily we have this somewhat built-in, and here’s a wrapper for it.

public string RenderRazorViewToString(string viewName, object model)
{
  ViewData.Model = model;
  using (var sw = new StringWriter())
  {
    var viewResult = ViewEngines.Engines.FindPartialView(ControllerContext, viewName);
    var viewContext = new ViewContext(ControllerContext, viewResult.View, ViewData, TempData, sw);
    viewResult.View.Render(viewContext, sw);
    viewResult.ViewEngine.ReleaseView(ControllerContext, viewResult.View);
    return sw.GetStringBuilder().ToString();
  }
}