Displaying External HTML file content in Microsoft MVC

 

We are developing an application where one of our MVC views is simply to render HTML snippets from an external file.  Since our favorite internet search engine did not turn up any information on how to do this, I am posting the following information. 

In our case the external HTML is a fairly simple snippet without javascript or form tags, so no manipulation of the file contents is required before display.

You can quickly read in the entire file to a string as follows:

using System.IO;
…
public static string GetHTMLContents(string filename)
{
    string results = string.Empty;
    if (File.Exists(filename))
    {
        results = File.ReadAllText(filename);
    }
    return results;
}

Then just place that string in the ViewData with a command like

ViewData["HTMLContent"] =  results;

and in the View render it with code that looks like:

<span style=" text-decoration:underline">HTML Content:</span><br/>
<%= ViewData["HTMLContent"] %>

Hope that helps.

Joe Kunk

Microsoft MVP


Okemos, MI USA


January 16, 2010