Using FindView in Orchard

I'm trying to use:

var viewEngineResult = ViewEngines.Engines.FindView(ControllerContext, myViewName, null);

as part of a process to render the contents of a view to send nice formatted emails. I'm using it inside an Orchard Controller. I have used similar code 开发者_如何学编程outside of Orchard in an MVC project and it works fine.

However in Orchard running this code fails to find the view I'm looking for and returns a view engine result that has searched 0 locations.

viewEngineResult has the following values after it is called:

• SearchedLocations: Count = 0,
• View: null,
• ViewEngine: null

Is there a reason this doesn't work in Orchard and is there a way to make it work?

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This answer is based on the advise given me by Bertrand, but I wanted to bring it together with what I'd discovered.

To be able to use FindPartialView I needed to inject an instance of IViewEngineProvider into my controller.

I then used the following code to resolve and render a view:

private String RenderView(String viewName, object model)
{
    var paths = new List<string>(); // This can just be an empty list and it still finds it.
    var viewEngine = _viewEngineProvider.CreateModulesViewEngine(new CreateModulesViewEngineParams {VirtualPaths = paths});
    var viewResult = viewEngine.FindPartialView(ControllerContext, viewName, false);

    if (viewResult.View == null) {
        throw new Exception("Couldn't find view " + viewName);
    }

    var viewData = new ViewDataDictionary {Model = model};

    using (var sw = new StringWriter())
    {
        var viewContext = new ViewContext(ControllerContext, viewResult.View, viewData, TempData, sw);
        viewResult.View.Render(viewContext, sw);

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

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I think you'll want to take a close look at Orchard.Framework/Mvc/ViewEngines, in particular IViewEngineProvider and ThemeAwareViewEngine. There's a lot more going on when in Orchard, such as themes, multi-tenancy, and a richer environment in general that may be needed to make this work. What's likely happening here is that the view engines don't have enough information to resolve a view and thus opt out of the chain. You might want to put a breakpoint into ThemeAwareViewEngine.FindView, and then inspect the private dependency fields of that class. I wouldn't be surprised if they were null, because getting to FindView through statics will probably not allow dependency injection to do its stuff properly. Then again I'm just guessing.