Home/ Questions/Q 789397
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-14T21:31:07+00:00

In ASP.NET MVC, How do I make a partial view available to all controllers?

  • 0

In ASP.NET MVC, How do I make a partial view available to all controllers? I want to create navigation that is common across the entire site, but when I place the Html.Action into my master page, it only works on views associated with 1 controller.

Right now, I have a controller action defined like this:

    // GET: GetCategoriesPartial
    [ChildActionOnly]
    public ActionResult GetCategoriesPartial()
    {
        var category = CategoriesDataContext.GetCategories();
        return PartialView(category);
    }

And I’ve created my partial view like this:

<%@ Import Namespace="wopr.Models" %>
<%@ Control Language="C#" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewUserControl" %>

<ul>
<%
    foreach (var cat in Model as IEnumerable<Category>) {
        %>
        <li><a href="/categories/Details/<%=cat.catID%>"><%=cat.catName%></a></li>
        <%
    }

%>
</ul>

My Master Page looks like this:

<%@ Import Namespace="wopr.Models" %>
<%@ Master Language="C#" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewMasterPage" %>

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" >
<head runat="server">
    <title><asp:ContentPlaceHolder ID="TitleContent" runat="server" /></title>
    <link type="text/css" rel="Stylesheet" href="/Content/Site.css" />
</head>
<body>
    <div class="wrap-all">
    <div style="text-align:right;">
        <a href="/">Home</a> | 
        <a href="/games/">Games</a> | 
        <a href="/games/Index2/1">Games <em>(paginated)</em></a> | 
        <a href="/categories/">Categories</a> | 
        <a href="/upload/">Upload</a>
    </div>
        <asp:ContentPlaceHolder ID="MainContent" runat="server">

        </asp:ContentPlaceHolder>


        <!--This errors on any non-CategoryController page.-->
            <%= Html.Action("GetCategoriesPartial")%>
        <!---->

    </div>
</body>
</html>

This code works as long as I’m viewing something handled by the CategoriesController. If I go to any view handled by a different controller, I get the exception:

System.Web.HttpException: A public action method ‘GetCategoriesPartial’ was not found on controller ‘wopr.Controllers.GamesController’.

How do I make this partial view available to all the site’s controllers?

Thanks for any help.
Quakkels

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    With MVC2 you can now render an action directly in the view. You will need to specify the controller that the action is on, if it isn’t rendered from the same controller. Your partial view can be located in the views folder for the controller (instead of shared) if you include it this way. Note that it won’t get the ViewData from the current action — only that set up by the action you are calling.

    <% Html.RenderAction( "GetCategoriesPartial", "Category" ) %>

    or

    <%= Html.Action( "GetCategoriesPartial", "Category" ) %>
    • 0