How to render MVC View on a Modal Popup Window

You might be wondering how to place an MVC View easily on a pop-up window like the image above that’s why you are in this page now?

Well you a bit lucky as I will tell you how easy is this to execute, but first of all let me tell you that I am using the Window Control from Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC to make my life easy and not re-invent the wheel and if you don’t have problems with that then read ahead.

Now lets start.  Lets pretend we want an application to set up a new client Account and what we want is when a user clicks a link create account it will pop up a window for account creation.  So like any other MVC Application you need your Model which in this case we will call “AccountSetupViewModel” which is a model for setting up accounts, a View for the pop up which we can call “NewAccount.cshtml” and Controller which we can call “SetupController”.  We also need some JavaScript file to separate our JavaScript commands to others for a cleaner implementation.

Lets first make our ViewModel in AccountSetupViewModel.cs under Controllers -> ViewModels -> Setup folder, we will make it simple so it will only contain AccountCode and AccountName

public class AccountSetupViewModel
{
    [Required]
    public string AccountCode { get; set; }

    [Required]
    public string AccountName { get; set; }

}

Now lets create a query to execute with firstName and lastName as a parameter and name it as GetAccountViewModel which we will place in  AccountSetupQuery.cs under Controllers -> Queries -> Setup, you can also create an interface for it if you wish.  This method will combine the firstName and lastName and sets the AccountName viewModel.

public AccountSetupViewModel GetAccountViewModel(string firstName, string lastName)
{
    var viewModel = new AccountSetupViewModel();

    viewModel.AccountCode = "RSM";
    viewModel.AccountName = firstName + " " + lastName;

    return viewModel;
}

Now lets create our Controller called SetupController.cs just in the Controllers directory and create a method called “GetNewAccountViewHtml”, this will be the method that will output a JsonResult to render our view

[HttpPost]
public JsonResult GetNewAccountViewHtml(string firstName, string lastName)
{
    string viewHtml = string.Empty;
    var viewModel = accountSetupQuery.GetAccountViewModel(firstName, lastName);

    viewHtml = RenderRazorViewToString("NewAccount", viewModel);

    var hashtable = new Hashtable();
    hashtable["viewHtml"] = viewHtml;

    return Json(hashtable);
}

You notice we have a method called RenderRazorViewToString, like how it’s called its purpose is to Render the MVC Razor View to string.   We will be using the MVC engine to render the view model as HTML so we can easily place it on the pop-up window.  You can place it in the controller but best if there is a separate class for this as you will  definitely reuse this a lot.

private string RenderRazorViewToString(string viewName, object model)
{
    ViewData.Model = model;

    using (var stringWriter = new StringWriter())
    {
        var viewResult = ViewEngines.Engines.FindPartialView(ControllerContext, viewName);
        var viewContext = new ViewContext(ControllerContext, viewResult.View, ViewData, TempData, stringWriter);
        viewResult.View.Render(viewContext, stringWriter);
        viewResult.ViewEngine.ReleaseView(ControllerContext, viewResult.View);

        return stringWriter.GetStringBuilder().ToString();
    }
}

Next lets create a view and call it “NewAccount.cshtml” and place it in Views -> Setup, this is the view that we will be using on the pop-up window.

@model CI5.Web.Mvc.Controllers.ViewModels.Setup.AccountSetupViewModel
@using Telerik.Web.Mvc.UI;
@{
    Layout = null;
}

This is an MVC view in a pop up <br />
Account Code : @Model.AccountCode <br />
Account Name : @Model.AccountName

Now you have all of  the contents you need for that pop-up, now lets create a view to call the pop-up we can use “Default.cshtml” under View -> Setup Folder in this instance.  On your view it will be simple as registering JavaScript on an a link to pop up the window so put this on your view.

<li class="newclient"><a href="#newClient" title="" onclick="javascript:AccountSetupForm.displayPopUpWindow('Raymund', 'Macaalay');">New Client</a></li>

Then using a javascript file that initializes on load of the “_SiteLayout.cshtml”

<script src="@Url.Content("~/Scripts/AccountSetup.js")" type="text/javascript"></script>

which we call “AccountSetup.js” located in Scripts folder we will create a function trigger the Telerik window pop up.

var AccountSetupForm = (function () {
    return {
        init: function () {
        },
        displayPopUpWindow: function (firstName, lastName) {

            var postData = {
                firstName: firstName,
                lastName: lastName
            };

            $.post("/Setup/GetNewAccountViewHtml", postData, function (data) {
                $.telerik.window.create({
                    title: "Sample Window",
                    html: unescape(data.viewHtml),
                    modal: true,
                    resizable: false,
                    visible: false,
                    width: 500,
                    height: 200
                })
            .data('tWindow').center().open();
            });
        }
    };

})();

$(document).ready(function () {
    AccountSetupForm.init();
});

So for a full view on how this is structured please refer to the image below.  I highlighted what was used on the codes above.