Pull generated HTML programmatically vs. a HttpWebRequest - asp.net-mvc-2

Question

For our newsletter, I generate the final body of the email in a web page and then want to pull that into the body of the email. I found a way to do that with HttpWebRequest.
private string GetHtmlBody(Guid id)
{
HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(String.Format("http://news.domain.com/News/View/{0}", id.ToString()));
HttpWebResponse responce = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse();
System.IO.StreamReader sr = new System.IO.StreamReader(responce.GetResponseStream());
return sr.ReadToEnd();
}
However, I feel there has to be a better way. Can I somehow pull the generated view without making a web call?

Answer 1

You could use MVCContrib for this task.
Or try to roll some ugly code:
public static string ViewToString(string controlName, object viewData)
{
var vd = new ViewDataDictionary(viewData);
var vp = new ViewPage { ViewData = vd };
var control = vp.LoadControl(controlName);
vp.Controls.Add(control);
var sb = new StringBuilder();
using (var sw = new StringWriter(sb))
using (HtmlTextWriter tw = new HtmlTextWriter(sw))
{
vp.RenderControl(tw);
}
return sb.ToString();
}
and then:
var viewModel = ...
string template = ViewToString("~/Emails/EmailTemplate.ascx", viewModel);

Answer 2

Assuming the the email code is in the same project as the website, then you should be able to call the action method, get the ActionResult back, then call the ExecuteResult method. The downside is that in order to do it this way, you will need to set it up such that the ExecuteResult will write to a stream that you can take advantage of. In order to do all of this, you will need to mock up some of the classes used by the ControllerContext.
What would probably be a better way (though will likely take more work), is to have the markup you want be generated by an XSLT transform. XSLT is a type of XML document template that can be merged with an XML document that holds data to produce a desired result. If you do this, then you can have your process that sends out emails run the transform as well as have your website run the transform. The advantage of this, is that if you want the markup to be different (i.e. you are redesigning thew newsletter), you will simply need to update the XSLT file and deploy it.
HTH

Answer 3

Finally got a working solution. After finding some proper search terms (thanks to #Darin) any many, many trials I found a solution that works. Putting this in my controller then passing the rendered string into my EmailHelper works great for what I needed.