asp.net mvc - MVC Controller Using Response Stream

Question

I'm using MVC 3 I would like to dynamically create a CSV file for download, but I am unsure as to the correct MVC orientated approach.

In conventional ASP.net, I would have written something like:

Response.ClearHeaders();
Response.ContentType = "text/csv";
Response.AddHeader("content-disposition", attachment;filename='Test.csv'");
Response.Write("1,2,3");
Response.End();

I have looked at the ContentResult action but it appears that I would need to create the result as a string, i.e.

return Content(myData, "text/csv");

I could, I suppose, build a string, but since these files could be several thousand lines long, this seems inefficient to me.

Could someone point me in the right direction? Thanks.

Answer 1

I have found one possible solution to this problem. You can simply define the action method to return an EmptyResult() and write directly to the response stream. For example:

public ActionResult RobotsText() {
    Response.ContentType = "text/plain";
    Response.Write("User-agent: *
Allow: /");
    return new EmptyResult();
}

This seems to work without any problems. Not sure how 'MVC' it is...