R – Sharing partial views between MVC projects – Do Areas Help

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.

You can extend Html helper class by this :

using System.Web.Mvc.Html


 public static MvcHtmlString PartialFor<TModel, TProperty>(this HtmlHelper<TModel> helper, System.Linq.Expressions.Expression<Func<TModel, TProperty>> expression, string partialViewName)
    {
        string name = ExpressionHelper.GetExpressionText(expression);
        object model = ModelMetadata.FromLambdaExpression(expression, helper.ViewData).Model;
        var viewData = new ViewDataDictionary(helper.ViewData)
        {
            TemplateInfo = new System.Web.Mvc.TemplateInfo
            {
                HtmlFieldPrefix = name
            }
        };

        return helper.Partial(partialViewName, model, viewData);

    }

and simply use it in your views like this :

<%= Html.PartialFor(model => model.Child, "_AnotherViewModelControl") %>

and you will see everything is ok!