asp.net mvc - ASP MVC View Content as JSON

Question

I have a MVC app with quite a few Controller Actions that are called using Ajax (jQuery) and return partial views content which updates a part of the screen. But what I would rather do is return JSON something like this.

return Json(new { 
    Result = true, 
    Message = "Item has been saved", 
    Content = View("Partial") 
});

Where the HTML is just a property of the Json. What this means is I need to retrieve the HTML that is rendered by the View method. Is there any easy way to do this, a few examples I have seen are quite convoluted.

Edit: This question was originally for ASP.NET MVC 1, but if version 2 makes it easier I would like to hear the answer.

Answer 1

Here is the answer! It is slight change from Martin From's method and it seems to work. If there are things missing please can people contribute any code changes in the comments section. Thanks.

From you controller call it like this:

string HTMLOutput = Utils.RenderPartialToString("~/Views/Setting/IndexMain.ascx", "", items, this.ControllerContext.RequestContext);

Add this to a class

public static string RenderPartialToString(string controlName, object viewData, object model, System.Web.Routing.RequestContext viewContext)
{
     ViewDataDictionary vd = new ViewDataDictionary(viewData);
     ViewPage vp = new ViewPage { ViewData = vd };

     vp.ViewData = vd;
     vp.ViewData.Model = model;
     vp.ViewContext = new ViewContext();
     vp.Url = new UrlHelper(viewContext);

     Control control = vp.LoadControl(controlName);

     vp.Controls.Add(control);

     StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();

     using (StringWriter sw = new StringWriter(sb))
     using (HtmlTextWriter tw = new HtmlTextWriter(sw))
     {
         vp.RenderControl(tw);
     }

     return sb.ToString();
}