Asp – Why ASP.NET MVC 2 will have its own client-side validation

"Obviously you'll still need to validate your input on the server side for the small percentage of users who disable javascript."

Just an update to this comment. Server-side validation has nothing to do with users that run with JavaScript disabled. Instead, it is needed for security reasons, and to do complex validation that can't be done on the client. A form should always have server-side validation. Client-side validation is only there as a convenience.

A malicious user could easily post data to your form bypassing any client-side validation that you have in place. Never trust input data!

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.