Question

I’m trying to use an Html.RenderAction in a strongly typed nature from the MVC Futures library

I have a Navigation action on my primary HomeController (area = “”) that I’m trying to call from my Site.Master

<% Html.RenderAction<HomeController>(x=>x.Navigation()); %>

This worked great until I added another HomeController to my Admin portable area. Then I started to the following error:

Multiple types were found that match
the controller named ‘Home’. This can
happen if the route that services this
request does not specify namespaces to
search for a controller that matches
the request. If this is the case,
register this route by calling an
overload of the ‘MapRoute’ method that
takes a ‘namespaces’ parameter.

The request for ‘Home’ has found the
following matching controllers:
Areas.Admin.Controllers.HomeController
Web.Controllers.HomeController

I was able to resolve the issue by using the following non-mvccontrib strongly typed RenderAction method. I would rather not have this non-strongly typed method on the page, is there a way to make the mvccontrib methods accept an area, or for them to know to generate the area based on routes or the namespace of the Controller being specified.

<% Html.RenderAction("Navigation", "Home", new { area = "" }); %>

I have already added to my global.asax.cs file to support the multiple controllers with a default area as shown below, and I’ve also verified that this is the correct namespace for my controllers.

_routeCollection.MapRoute("Default", "{controller}/{action}/{id}", new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional }, new[] { "Web.Controllers" });

Answer 1

Apparently there is not support for this in the futures project at this time, or they changed it since Futures v1.0. I used reflector to disassemble the futures library and found the source for the RenderAction method and modified it to parse the area out of the Controller’s namespace and add it into the RouteValues before it processes. I’m assuming that I’ll likely have to do something similar for ActionLink’s as well if I want them to behave in the same way.

Here is a sample of the code that I used, so hopefully this can help someone else in the future. I will likely create new methods indicating that it will parse the areas, rather than an overload as I have thus far

public static void RenderAction<TController>(this HtmlHelper helper, Expression<Action<TController>> action) where TController : Controller
{
    var ctrlNamespace = typeof(TController).Namespace;

    int areaStart = ctrlNamespace.IndexOf(".Areas.");
    if (areaStart > -1) 
    {
        ctrlNamespace = ctrlNamespace.Substring(areaStart + 7);
        int areaEnd = ctrlNamespace.IndexOf(".");
        ctrlNamespace = ctrlNamespace.Substring(0, areaEnd);
    }
    else
    {
        ctrlNamespace = String.Empty; //default area
    }

    helper.ViewContext.RouteData.Values.Add("area", ctrlNamespace);

    RouteValueDictionary routeValuesFromExpression = ExpressionHelper.GetRouteValuesFromExpression<TController>(action);
    foreach (KeyValuePair<string, object> pair in helper.ViewContext.RouteData.Values)
    {
        if (!routeValuesFromExpression.ContainsKey(pair.Key))
        {
            routeValuesFromExpression.Add(pair.Key, pair.Value);
        }
    }

    helper.RenderRoute(routeValuesFromExpression);
}