Asp.net-mvc – Calling non-Action methods from view-MVC .NET

asp.net-mvcasp.net-mvc-4

I want to call a non-action method in a view. Can I do that? In other words, there is a method in my controller which returns a string. I want to call that method in my view (.cshtml) and show it in the view. All I could see was, the methods should return an ActionResult. But in my case I do not need a view returned just a string.

Best Answer

The best way (and MVC convention way) to do this is to use a ViewModel. Quick example:

Model

public class MyViewModel {
    public string StringValue { get; set; }
}

Controller

public class MyController : Controller 
{
    public ActionResult MyView() 
    {
        var model = new MyViewModel
        {
            StringValue = CallMyMethod()
        }

        return View(model);
    }
}

View

@model MyViewModel @*(use fully qualified namespace)*@

@Model.StringValue @*<-- this will print it out on the view*@

Hope that helps!

Related Solutions

Asp.net-mvc – Can an ASP.NET MVC controller return an Image

Use the base controllers File method.

public ActionResult Image(string id)
{
    var dir = Server.MapPath("/Images");
    var path = Path.Combine(dir, id + ".jpg"); //validate the path for security or use other means to generate the path.
    return base.File(path, "image/jpeg");
}

As a note, this seems to be fairly efficient. I did a test where I requested the image through the controller (http://localhost/MyController/Image/MyImage) and through the direct URL (http://localhost/Images/MyImage.jpg) and the results were:

MVC: 7.6 milliseconds per photo
Direct: 6.7 milliseconds per photo

Note: this is the average time of a request. The average was calculated by making thousands of requests on the local machine, so the totals should not include network latency or bandwidth issues.

Asp.net-mvc – How to render an ASP.NET MVC view as a string

Here's what I came up with, and it's working for me. I added the following method(s) to my controller base class. (You can always make these static methods somewhere else that accept a controller as a parameter I suppose)

MVC2 .ascx style

protected string RenderViewToString<T>(string viewPath, T model) {
  ViewData.Model = model;
  using (var writer = new StringWriter()) {
    var view = new WebFormView(ControllerContext, viewPath);
    var vdd = new ViewDataDictionary<T>(model);
    var viewCxt = new ViewContext(ControllerContext, view, vdd,
                                new TempDataDictionary(), writer);
    viewCxt.View.Render(viewCxt, writer);
    return writer.ToString();
  }
}

Razor .cshtml style

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();
  }
}

Edit: added Razor code.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Asp.net-mvc – Can an ASP.NET MVC controller return an Image

Asp.net-mvc – How to render an ASP.NET MVC view as a string

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