Getting the rendered output of a Spring 3.1 MVC View

I am needing to the get the rendered output of Spring 3.1 MVC View into a String (for sending to a PDF converter, or to a MIME email, etc...) and I have been using the following code:

This is injected into the Controller

    @Autowired
    TilesViewResolver viewResolver;

And the following helper method:

    private String renderViewToString(ModelMap map, HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse httpServletResponse, final String viewName) {
        final StringWriter html = new StringWriter();
        View pdfView = new View() {
            @Override
            public String getContentType() {
                return "application/pdf";
            }

            @Override
            public void render(Map<String, ?> model, HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) throws Exception {

                HttpServletResponseWrapper wrapper = new HttpServletResponseWrapper(response) {
                    @Override
                    public PrintWriter getWriter() throws IOException {
                        return new PrintWriter(html);
                    }
                };
                View realView = viewResolver.resolveViewName(viewName, Locale.US);
                Map<String, Object> newModel = new HashMap<String, Object>(model);
                newModel.put("pdfMode", Boolean.TRUE);
                realView.render(newModel, request, wrapper);
            }
        };
        try {
            pdfView.render(map, request, httpServletResponse);
        } catch (Exception e) {
            // Ignored for now
        }
        return html.toString();
    }

Credit to Ted Young and his spring spring-mvc