ASP.NET MVC Razor: How to render a Razor Partial View's HTML inside the controller action

@Html.Partial("nameOfPartial", Model)

Update

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();
    }
}

Although adequate answers have already been given, I'd like to propose a less verbose solution, that can be used without the helper methods available in an MVC controller class. Using a third party library called "RazorEngine" you can use .Net file IO to get the contents of the razor file and call

string html = Razor.Parse(razorViewContentString, modelObject);

Get the third party library here.

You could also use the RenderView Controller extension from here (source)

and use it like this:

public ActionResult Do() {
var html = this.RenderView("index", theModel);
...
}

it works for razor and web-forms viewengines

I saw that someone was wondering how to do it for another controller.

In my case I had all of my email templates in the Views/Email folder, but you could modify this to pass in the controller in which you have views associated for.

public static string RenderViewToString(Controller controller, string viewName, object model)
    {
        var oldController = controller.RouteData.Values["controller"].ToString();

        if (controller.GetType() != typeof(EmailController))
            controller.RouteData.Values["controller"] = "Email";

        var oldModel = controller.ViewData.Model;
        controller.ViewData.Model = model;
        try
        {
            using (var sw = new StringWriter())
            {
                var viewResult = ViewEngines.Engines.FindView(controller.ControllerContext, viewName,
                                                                           null);

                var viewContext = new ViewContext(controller.ControllerContext, viewResult.View, controller.ViewData, controller.TempData, sw);
                viewResult.View.Render(viewContext, sw);

                //Cleanup
                controller.ViewData.Model = oldModel;
                controller.RouteData.Values["controller"] = oldController;

                return sw.GetStringBuilder().ToString();
            }
        }
        catch (Exception ex)
        {
            Elmah.ErrorSignal.FromCurrentContext().Raise(ex);

            throw ex;
        }
    }

Essentially what this does is take a controller, such as AccountController and modify it to think it's an EmailController so that the code will look in the Views/Email folder. It's necessary to do this because the FindView method doesn't take a straight up path as a parameter, it wants a ControllerContext.

Once done rendering the string, it returns the AccountController back to its initial state to be used by the Response object.

great code; little hint: if you sometimes have to bypass more data and not only the viewmodel ..

 if (model is ViewDataDictionary)
 {
     controller.ViewData = model as ViewDataDictionary;
 } else {
     controller.ViewData.Model = model;
 }

Borrowing @jgauffin answer as an HtmlHelper extension:

public static class HtmlHelperExtensions
{
    public static MvcHtmlString RenderPartialViewToString(
        this HtmlHelper html, 
        ControllerContext controllerContext, 
        ViewDataDictionary viewData,
        TempDataDictionary tempData,
        string viewName, 
        object model)
    {
        viewData.Model = model;
        string result = String.Empty;

        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);

            result = sw.GetStringBuilder().ToString();
        }

        return MvcHtmlString.Create(result);
    }
}

Usage in a razor view:

Html.RenderPartialViewToString(ViewContext, ViewData, TempData, "Search", Model)