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.
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
In your action method, return Json(object) to return JSON to your page.
Then just call the action method using Ajax. You could use one of the helper methods from the ViewPage such as
SomeMethod would be a javascript method that then evaluates the Json object returned.
If you want to return a plain string, you can just use the ContentResult:
ContentResult by default returns a text/plain as its contentType.
This is overloadable so you can also do: