Controller that calls a partial view that should display inside the Layout view

Question

In a standard MVC application we have _Layout.cshtml and an Index.cshtml view. Now imagine if the user receives an email activation after a registration and now he/she clicks on that link.

The link points to /Account/ActivateAccount and after I process the activation, I wanted to redirect the user to the Login.cshtml partial view displaying a message.

I'm aware I can pass the message via the TempData["Message"] but what I don't know is how to redirect to a partial view and have that display inside the _Layout.cshtml instead that by itself.

At least this is what is happening when I call RedirectToAction("Login", "Home")

Note: all "home" based partial views are displaying within a < div id="divmain"> and my ideal solution would be to be able to decide what view should display inside that div, from the controller .

What's the right way to call a Partial View to be displayed from within another Controller ??

Answer 1

I'm not entirely sure I understand the question but I think what you're asking is if you can call a partial view from the _layout? This can be done with @Html.Action() helper. It will call out to a controller and method you specify and insert the result. The method you call would just be a PartialResult that returns the partial view with whatever data you need.

This is in contrast to @Html.Partial() which will render the partial view in place with whatever data you provide without routing back through a controller.

EDIT:

To summarize the comments to this answer, it seems I misunderstood the requirement. A user receives an email and clicks the link to activate their registration. The controller action that handles that request activates the user and then it needs to redirect to something. In this case, there was already a partial view which would serve the purpose but it couldn't be redirected to directly for some reasons. My suggestion was to just create a new View which contained a @Html.Partial() call to basically wrap the partial in a full view page.

The action method which handled the click could then just return that view directly or, if you consider the click of the link to be a "post" since it changes the application model by validating the user, you would create a new controller action and return RedirectToAction() directly. This would be like following the Post, Redirect, Get method and would prevent some issue if the user tried to refresh the "activated" page. It would also give more control over the URL naming.