Question

I’ve seen a number of examples that use an anonymous type to pass data to a view. I seem to be missing a crucial bit of information, though. Consider the following contrived example:

public class BlogController : Controller
{
    public ActionResult Index()
    {
        return View();
    }

    public ActionResult Title(object args)
    {
        return View(args);
    }

}

Index.aspx calls

<%= Html.Action("Title", new { Name = "Jake" }) %>

And title.ascx is simply:

<%@ Control Language="C#" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewUserControl<dynamic>" %>
<h3><%= Model.Name %>'s Blog</h3>

Navigating to the action in question causes a runtime exception:

'object' does not contain a definition for 'Name'

I realize that there are other ways to do this. I could make my view strongly-typed or push the data into the ViewData object. In this particular case, I want to be able to pass any object that has a Name property and bind to the Name. Is there something I’m missing?

Answer 1

The parameter args is of type object. When you are passing your route values to Html.Action, you’re actually ending up with a string argument called Name which of course won’t bind to the parameter args.

Change your call to:

<%= Html.Action("Title", new { args = new { Name = "Jake" } }) %>