One of the upcoming new features being added to ASP.NET MVC 2 Beta is a little helper method called Html.RenderAction and its counterpart, Html.Action . This has been a part of our ASP.NET MVC Futures library for a while, but is now being added to the core product.

Both of these methods allow you to call into an action method from a view and output the results of the action in place within the view. The difference between the two is that Html.RenderAction will render the result directly to the Response (which is more efficient if the action returns a large amount of HTML) whereas Html.Action returns a string with the result.

For the sake of brevity, I’ll use the term RenderAction to refer to both of these methods. Here’s a quick look at how you might use this method. Suppose you have the following controller.

public class MyController { public ActionResult Index () { return View (); } [ ChildActionOnly ] public ActionResult Menu () { var menu = GetMenuFromSomewhere (); return PartialView ( menu ); } }

The Menu action grabs the Menu model and returns a partial view with just the menu.

<%@ Control Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewUserControl<Menu>" %> <ul> <% foreach(var item in Model.MenuItem) { %> <li><%= item %></li> <% } %> </ul>

In your Index.aspx view, you can now call into the Menu action to display the menu:

<%@ Page %> <html> <head><title></title></head> <body> <%= Html.Action("Menu") %> <h1>Welcome to the Index View</h1> </body> </html>

Notice that the Menu action is marked with a ChildActionOnlyAttribute . This attribute indicates that this action should not be callable directly via the URL. It’s not required for an action to be callable via RenderAction .

We also added a new property to ControllerContext named IsChildAction . This lets you know whether the action method is being called via a RenderAction call or via the URL.

This is used by some of our action filters which should do not get called when applied to an action being called via RenderAction such as AuthorizeAttribute and OutputCacheAttribute .

Passing Values With RenderAction

Because these methods are being used to call action methods much like an ASP.NET Request does, it’s possible to specify route values when calling RenderAction . What’s really cool about this is you can pass in complex objects.

For example, suppose we want to supply the menu with some options. We can define a new class, MenuOptions like so.

public class MenuOptions { public int Width { get ; set ; } public int Height { get ; set ; } }

Next, we’ll change the Menu action method to accept this as a parameter.

[ ChildActionOnly ] public ActionResult Menu ( MenuOptions options ) { return PartialView ( options ); }

And now we can pass in menu options from our action call in the view

<%= Html.Action("Menu", new { options = new MenuOptions { Width=400, Height=500} })%>

Cooperating with the ActionName attribute {.clear}

Another thing to note is that RenderAction honors the ActionName attribute when calling an action name. Thus if you annotate the action like so.

[ ChildActionOnly ] [ ActionName ( "CoolMenu" )] public ActionResult Menu ( MenuOptions options ) { return PartialView ( options ); }

You’ll need to make sure to use “CoolMenu” as the action name and not “Menu” when calling RenderAction .

Cooperating With Output Caching

Note that in previous previews of the RenderAction method, there was an issue where calling RenderAction to render an action method that had the OutputCache attribute would cause the whole view to be cached. We fixed that issue by by changing the OutputCache attribute to not cache if it’s part of a child request.

If you want to output cache the portion of the page rendered by the call to RenderAction , you can use a technique I mentioned here where you place the call to RenderAction in a ViewUserControl which has its OutputCache directive set.

Summary

Let us know how this feature works for you. I think it could really help simplify some scenarios when composing a user interface from small parts.