Question

I’m sure it’s something small (or maybe big), but my child action isn’t working. I have a childaction that populates a List with year values. This list is to be displayed via a partial control. I see the respective pieces of code executed when I step through the code, yet nothing renders on the page.

Child Action:

    [ChildActionOnly]
    public ActionResult GetYearList()
    {
        return PartialView(_FormService.getYears());
    }

Call used in parent view:

<% using (Html.BeginForm()) {%>
    <%= Html.ValidationSummary(true) %>
    Select Year: <% Html.Action("GetYearList"); %>

Partial View code:

<%@ Control Language="C#" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewUserControl<List<SelectListItem>>" %>

<% if (Model != null)
   { %>
        <% Html.DropDownList("Year", Model, "Select  Year"); %>
<% } else { %>
    <p> No Years Found </p>
<% }  %>    

Any clue what I’m doing wrong? I could just render the partial view directly, but I’m really trying to figure out how the ChildActions work so I use them in the future should that logic be more complicated.

edit 1

Silly semantics. Had to change my GetYearList partial view to:

    <%= Html.DropDownList("Year", Model, "Select 1099 Year") %>

instead of

<% Html.DropDownList("Year", Model, "Select  Year"); %>

Same sort of thing on parent view as Darin stated:

change  Select Year: <% Html.Action("GetYearList"); %>

to <%= Html.Action("Get1099YearList") %> 

Answer 1

You are invoking the child action but doing nothing to render it to the output:

<% Html.Action("GetYearList"); %>

should become:

<%= Html.Action("GetYearList") %>

or if you prefer:

<% Html.RenderAction("GetYearList"); %>

And their Razor equivalents for those who might be interested:

@Html.Action("GetYearList")
@{Html.RenderAction("GetYearList");}