How to Email Screen in ASP.Net/MVC

I have an application that is made up of 10+ related ascx files that we use to display our data on the users browser using the Html.RenderPartial helper.

I need to email the data that is a duplicate of what is on screen. I would like to be able to get the generated html without having to do a screen scrape.

Are there any suggestions as to how to do this? I’m just trying to keep from duplicating the work.

Answers:

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Method 1

http://www.brightmix.com/blog/renderpartial-to-string-in-asp-net-mvc/ has a good solution for rendering a View to a string so you can send it in email.

/// Static Method to render string - put somewhere of your choosing
public static string RenderPartialToString(string controlName, object viewData)
{
     ViewDataDictionary vd = new ViewDataDictionary(viewData);
     ViewPage vp = new ViewPage { ViewData = vd };
     Control control = vp.LoadControl(controlName);

     vp.Controls.Add(control);

     StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
     using (StringWriter sw = new StringWriter(sb))
     {
         using (HtmlTextWriter tw = new HtmlTextWriter(sw))
         {
             vp.RenderControl(tw);
         }
     }

     return sb.ToString();
}

Method 2

In regular asp.net you can override the Render() and provide your own HtmlWriter to intercept the rendered html before copying it to the HtmlWriter that was passed in.

I don’t know off the top of my head how you’d intercept this in MVC, but I’m sure you’ll be able to do it – especially if you make a new HttpModule in the pipeline to pre-post process the output stream.

All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0