Rendering a view to a string in ASP.NET MVC 2

Question

We need to render an ActionResult to a string to add pages to our internal search engine index. We settled on this solution to render to string.

I've run into a problem with the ExecuteResult call used to process the View.

Code Snippet:

var oldController = controllerContext.RouteData.Values["controller"];
controllerContext.RouteData.Values["controller"] = 
                  typeof(TController).Name.Replace("Controller", "");

viewResult.ExecuteResult(controllerContext); // this line breaks

I receive the following error:

"Object reference not set to instance of object" error.

I've confirmed viewResult is not null, so the exception has to be thrown internally in ExecuteResult.

What could we be missing?

Spark provides rendering view to string out of the box and friction less. :) — Arnis Lapsa
– Arnis Lapsa, Commented Mar 17, 2010 at 10:25
Yeah, but porting all of our views to Spark isn't really practical. — Frank Rosario
– Frank Rosario, Commented Mar 17, 2010 at 16:41

Community · Accepted Answer · 2017-05-23 12:13:31Z

2

I figured it out. The issue with ExecuteResult wasn't working as expected was because I hadn't mocked the ControllerContext properly. I was able to solve the issue by mocking the controllercontext as described in this SO post:

Mocking Asp.net-mvc Controller Context

Hope this post helps someone in the future if they're trying to do something similar.

edited May 23, 2017 at 12:13

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answered Mar 27, 2010 at 1:48

Frank Rosario

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George Stocker · Accepted Answer · 2010-03-16 17:23:26Z

0

I haven't tried it myself but Phil Haack did suggest a way to output a view to a string here with MVC in mind.

edited Mar 16, 2010 at 17:23

George Stocker

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answered Mar 16, 2010 at 16:32

Colin Newell

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Community · Accepted Answer · 2017-05-23 11:48:22Z

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MVCContrib has a BlockRenderer class which could be helpful for this scenario.

edited May 23, 2017 at 11:48

CommunityBot

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answered Mar 16, 2010 at 19:02

Darin Dimitrov

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1 Comment

Frank Rosario Over a year ago

Yeah, but it seems the BlockRenderer class has been deprecated in the latest version of MVCContrib that's compatible with MVC2 RC2.

Paul · Accepted Answer · 2010-03-26 02:46:49Z

0

Not a direct answer to your question, but why would you render the whole view as a string to your search index, rather than either a) pushing the data itself into the index (LINQ to Lucene lets you do this w/ attributes) or b) offloading the work to a separate process that crawls the front end using some set of rights?

answered Mar 26, 2010 at 2:46

Paul

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