Using Razor without MVC

Question

I need to merge templates with data to create unique strings at runtime. It was suggested that I look at the Razor templating view engine that comes in ASP.NET MVC 3. Looks great, but I need to use it outside of MVC view creation.

I know I can use the core Razor engine directly, but I've also found a couple of projects that make using Razor directly easier. Like:

1. Rick Strahl's Razor Hosting Template Engine- http://www.west-wind.com/weblog/posts/864461.aspx
2. Razor Engine on GitHub - https://github.com/Antaris/RazorEngine

Does anyone have any guidance on using Razor outside of MVC as a standalone template engine? Any experience with these wrapper projects? are there other Razor hosting implementations I should look into?

Solution 1

You may take a look at the following blog post which illustrates how you could use the Razor view engine to render a template to a string.

Solution 2

If you want to generate real content from razor template, you can use RazorEngine.

Solution 3

Look at RazorTemplates library. It's more lightweight than RazorEngine library, it's thread-safe and has very nice minimal interface.

Solution 4

Phil Haack posted about this way to do it using a generated class.

• You create a .cshtml file and then use a compile time extension on the file to generate a class. Then you can just do this:

  var template = new RazorTemplate {
      Model = new[] { 
          new {Name = "Scott", Id = 1},
          new {Name = "Steve", Id = 2},
          new {Name = "Phil", Id = 3},
          new {Name = "David", Id = 4}
      }
  };
  Console.WriteLine(template.TransformText());
  

Solution 5

There is a nice post how to use RazorEngine: How to create a localizable text template engine using RazorEngine

View more solutions

Comments

[Michael Levy]

that link was in the original question.

[Norman H]

Simple takes the day in my book. Thanks for dropping this @Simon_Weaver! You seem like a guy who might just hang out with @JonSkeet you have so much SO cred! :-) It pays to dig through all the answers. :-)

[K-Dawg]

I thought I'd check this out. It's so simple to use! Thanks!