Asp.net MVC: Send back HTML inside Json object

Question

I want to return back html inside my json object however this does not seem to work, my code:

return new JsonResult() { Data = new { Error = false, NewComment = PartialView("Review/InlineCommentUC", dto) } }; 

I want NewComment to have some html inside it...

What I recieve (using firebug) for the NewComment object in json format is:

TempData = [] View = null, ViewData = [] ViewEngineCollection = some data.. ViewName = name of view 

I am using Jquery to render the output onto the html, the reason for sending back a json object is, so I can handle my errors very easily.

Ideally a custom Action Result is what I am looking for...

Answer 1

Is http://craftycodeblog.com/2010/05/15/asp-net-mvc-render-partial-view-to-string/ what you're looking for?

Copied using the WayBackMachine.

I have run into a situation where I would like to render a partial view to a string and then return it as part of a JSON response like so:

return Json(new { statusCode = 1, statusMessage = "The person has been added!", personHtml = PartialView("Person", person) }); 

The ability to do something like this would open up a ton of amazing possibilities, so I really scoured the internet looking for a solution. Unfortunately, no one seems to have come up with a clean solution for it, so I dug into the MVC code and came up one…and because I’m such a nice guy, you get to copy it for free. ;)

public abstract class MyBaseController : Controller { protected string RenderPartialViewToString() { return RenderPartialViewToString(null, null); } protected string RenderPartialViewToString(string viewName) { return RenderPartialViewToString(viewName, null); } protected string RenderPartialViewToString(object model) { return RenderPartialViewToString(null, model); } protected string RenderPartialViewToString(string viewName, object model) { if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(viewName)) viewName = ControllerContext.RouteData.GetRequiredString("action"); ViewData.Model = model; using (StringWriter sw = new StringWriter()) { ViewEngineResult viewResult = ViewEngines.Engines.FindPartialView(ControllerContext, viewName); ViewContext viewContext = new ViewContext(ControllerContext, viewResult.View, ViewData, TempData, sw); viewResult.View.Render(viewContext, sw); return sw.GetStringBuilder().ToString(); } } } 

Now you can simply do this:

public class MyController : MyBaseController { public ActionResult CreatePerson(Person p) { if (ModelState.IsValid) { try { PersonRepository.Create(p); return Json(new { statusCode = 1, statusMessage = "The person has been added!", personHtml = RenderPartialViewToString("Person", p) }); } catch (Exception ex) { return Json(new { statusCode = 0, statusMessage = "Error: " + ex.Message }); } } else return Json(new { statusCode = 0, statusMessage = "Invalid data!" }); } } 

Also note that you can modify these functions to render a View (rather than a PartialView) with this small change:

ViewEngineResult viewResult = ViewEngines.Engines.FindView(ControllerContext, viewName); 

Enjoy!

Answer 2

PartialView returns a PartialViewResult^docs and that is what gets encoded to JSON.

Look at http://forums.asp.net/post/3761391.aspx on how to render the PartialView to a string