Getting a Partial View's HTML from inside of the controller

This is a solution that is working with ASP.Net MVC 1.0 (many that claim to work with beta 3 don't work with 1.0), doesn't suffer of the 'Server cannot set content type after HTTP headers have been sent' problem and can be called from within a controller (not only a view):

/// <summary>
/// Render a view into a string. It's a hack, it may fail badly.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="name">Name of the view, that is, its path.</param>
/// <param name="data">Data to pass to the view, a model or something like that.</param>
/// <returns>A string with the (HTML of) view.</returns>
public static string RenderPartialToString(string controlName, object viewData) {
    ViewPage viewPage = new ViewPage() { ViewContext = new ViewContext() };
    viewPage.Url = GetBogusUrlHelper();

    viewPage.ViewData = new ViewDataDictionary(viewData);
    viewPage.Controls.Add(viewPage.LoadControl(controlName));

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

    return sb.ToString();
}

public static UrlHelper GetBogusUrlHelper() {
  var httpContext = HttpContext.Current;

  if (httpContext == null) {
    var request = new HttpRequest("/", Config.Url.ToString(), "");
    var response = new HttpResponse(new StringWriter());
    httpContext = new HttpContext(request, response);
  }

  var httpContextBase = new HttpContextWrapper(httpContext);
  var routeData = new RouteData();
  var requestContext = new RequestContext(httpContextBase, routeData);

  return new UrlHelper(requestContext);
}

It's a static method you can drop somewhere you find it convenient. You can call it this way:

string view = RenderPartialToString("~/Views/Controller/AView.ascx", someModelObject); 

I put together a rough framework which allows you to render views to a string from a controller method in MVC Beta. This should help solve this limitation for now.

Additionally, I also put together a Rails-like RJS javascript generating framework for MVC Beta.

Check it out at http://www.brightmix.com/blog/how-to-renderpartial-to-string-in-asp-net-mvc and let me know what you think.

You would create your action like this:

        public PartialViewResult LoginForm()
        {
            var model = // get model data from somewhere
            return PartialView(model);
        }

And the action would return the rendered partial view to your jquery response.

Your jquery could look something like this:

$('#targetdiv').load('/MyController/LoginForm',function(){alert('complete!');});