Home/ Questions/Q 8505255
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-06-11T02:16:00+00:00

I have a problem getting my layout.cshtml to have a dynamically chosen CSS file

  • 0

I have a problem getting my layout.cshtml to have a dynamically chosen CSS file based on some business logic.

In my layout.cshtml I have the following in my head section:

<head>
    <link href="@{Html.RenderAction("CustomStyleSheetPath", "Shared");}" rel="Stylesheet" type="text/css" />
</head>

In my ‘Shared’ Controller, I have:

[ChildActionOnly]
public virtual string CustomStyleSheetPath()
{
    string customCssPath = GetCssPath();  // e.g. "css/customStyleSheet.css"
    return customCssPath;
}

When I display the page, the css not pulled in correctly and I have the following when I view source:

<head>
    <linkcss\customStyleSheet.css href="" rel="Stylesheet" type="text/css" />
</head>

This code used to work in MVC 3 so I’m wondering what I’m doing wrong?

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Use Html.Action instead of Html.RenderAction

    <link href="@(Html.Action("CustomStyleSheetPath)", "Shared"))" 
      rel="Stylesheet" type="text/css" />

    Html.Action will return the rendered HTML in an McvHtmlString while Html.RenderAction writes directly to the response.

    In MVC4 there is a new feature called conditional attributes that’s why it is not working.

    Because Html.RenderAction won’t return anything so the attribute href won’t be rendered but the other hand Html.RenderAction writes directly to the response so you get this messed up result.

    • 0