How to get current controller and action from inside Child action?

Question

I have a portion of my view that is rendered via RenderAction calling a child action. How can I get the Parent controller and Action from inside this Child Action.

When I use..

@ViewContext.RouteData.Values["action"]

I get back the name of the Child Action but what I need is the Parent/Calling action.

Thanks

BTW I am using MVC 3 with Razor.

Answer 1

And if you want to access this from within the child action itself (rather than the view) you can use

ControllerContext.ParentActionViewContext.RouteData.Values["action"] 

Answer 2

Found it...

how-do-i-get-the-routedata-associated-with-the-parent-action-in-a-partial-view

ViewContext.ParentActionViewContext.RouteData.Values["action"]

Answer 3

If the partial is inside another partial, this won't work unless we find the top most parent view content. You can find it with this:

var parentActionViewContext = ViewContext.ParentActionViewContext;
while (parentActionViewContext.ParentActionViewContext != null)
{
    parentActionViewContext = parentActionViewContext.ParentActionViewContext;
}

Answer 4

I had the same problem and came up with same solution as Carlos Martinez, except I turned it into an extension:

public static class ViewContextExtension
{
    public static ViewContext TopmostParent(this ViewContext context)
    {
        ViewContext result = context;
        while (result.ParentActionViewContext != null)
        {
            result = result.ParentActionViewContext;
        }
        return result;
    }
}

I hope this will help others who have the same problem.

Answer 5

Use model binding to get the action name, controller name, or any other url values:

routes.MapRoute("City", "{citySlug}", new { controller = "home", action = "city" });

[ChildActionOnly]
public PartialViewResult Navigation(string citySlug)
{
    var model = new NavigationModel()
    {
        IsAuthenticated = _userService.IsAuthenticated(),
        Cities = _cityService.GetCities(),
        GigsWeBrought = _gigService.GetGigsWeBrought(citySlug),
        GigsWeWant = _gigService.GetGigsWeWant(citySlug)
    };

    return PartialView(model);
}