Razor Partial View not Rendering

Question

If I use the following Controller method:

public ActionResult Menu()
{
    // do stuff...

    return PartialView("viewName", navLinks);
}

calling the partial view in _Layout.cshtml like this:

<div id="categories">
    @{ Html.Action("Menu", "Nav"); }
</div>

With the following ASCX partial view:

<%@ Control Language="C#"
    Inherits="ViewUserController<IEnumerable<MyDataType>>" %>

<% foreach(var link in Model) { %>
    <%: Html.Route.Link(link.Text, link.RouteValues) %>
<% } %>

everything works fine. Yay.

---

BUT, if I use either of the following RAZOR partial views:

@model IEnumerable<MyDataType>

@foreach(var link in Model){
    Html.RouteLink(link.Text, link.RouteValues);
}

or...

@model IEnumerable<MyDataType>

@{
    Layout = null;
}

@foreach(var link in Model){
    Html.RouteLink(link.Text, link.RouteValues);
}

I get nothing. there's no exception thrown, I just don't get anything rendered. I know the problem isn't with the controller method (it works just great with the ASCX partial view).

What's going on here?

Answer 1

Try changing this:

@foreach(var link in Model){
    Html.RouteLink(link.Text, link.RouteValues);
}

to this:

@foreach(var link in Model){
    @Html.RouteLink(link.Text, link.RouteValues);
}

It looks like without the @ the method is being called, but the return value is just being dscarded. Putting the @ causes it to be written in the response.

Answer 2

The RenderAction method writes the action directly to the view and returns void.
The Action method returns the action's contents but doesn't write anything to the view.

Writing @something will print the value of something to the page.
You cannot write @Html.RenderAction, since RenderAction doesn't return anything.

Writing Html.Action(...) (without @) calls the method normally, but doesn't do anything with its return value.