![](/contentassets/915d9354b6814d088b7a92db5040fbfd/episerver-render-content.png?width=790&height=444&quality=80&rmode=max&format=webp)
Render ContentArea and Content Views to string
How to render pages, blocks, media and other in a custom content rendering out of the MVC context pipeline.
Published 31th of October 2020
Epi CMS version 11.14
I had the need to render the content from a content area and deliver it to react front end thru a web api.
Seemed not so hard, in theory, google a little, found some, like this blog post from EMVP colleague Casper Rasmussen http://fellow.aagaardrasmussen.dk/2016/11/01/how-to-render-an-episerver-contentreference-via-your-webapi/
I evolved his code a little bit, since I had blocks without controllers, I had to take care of that by adding a fake custom controll if the controller was missing, and it also seemed that Episerver had changed some stuff under the hood, like “contextmode” see code routeData.DataTokens[“contextmode”] //important to declare that the rendering should NOT be “edit”-mode when runing the web api / page in edit mode.
I also wanted to render ContentArea with use of display options, so I added LoadDisplayOptions and used tags feature when rendering.
Result: success!
Example usage
Content Renderer on a page ContentArea
//inside a web api call or what ever CategoryDataModel currentContent = _urlResolver.Route(new UrlBuilder(Request.Headers.Referrer?.AbsolutePath)) as CategoryDataModel; //CategoryDataModel is Episerver CatalogNode if (currentContent != null && currentContent.BlockContentInProductList != null && currentContent.BlockContentInProductList.FilteredItems.Any()) { //ContentRendererService from Constructor IEnumerablelistOfRenderedContent = _contentRendererService.RenderContentToHtml(currentContent.BlockContentInProductList.FilteredItems)?.ToArray(); return listOfRenderedContent; }
The greatness with this is the renderer loading the DisplayOptions and uses the tag feature in Episerver
Render a ContentReference with a specific tag
//ContentRendererService from Constructor _contentRenderService.Render(contentReference, tags: new string[1] { "sometag" }); // or tags: null if default view
Result
![](/contentassets/915d9354b6814d088b7a92db5040fbfd/bild-1.png?width=677&height=124&mode=stretch)
The Code
Copy and paste this into a new class, and your good to go:
![](/contentassets/915d9354b6814d088b7a92db5040fbfd/bild.png?width=533&height=201&mode=stretch)
About the author
Luc Gosso
– Independent Senior Web Developer
working with Azure and Episerver
Twitter: @LucGosso
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/luc-gosso/
Github: github.com/lucgosso