ASP.Net MVC How to pass url parameters using Html.RenderAction to a ChildAction

Question

I thought this was going to be straight forward but I managed to hose it up some how. If I want to pass URL parameters to another action do I have to create a new route for that?

controller

[ChildActionOnly]
    public ActionResult ContentSection(string sectionAlias, string mvcController, string mvcAction = null)

view

@Html.RenderAction("ContentSection", "Portal", new {sectionAlias = "TermsAndConditions", mvcController = "Portal", mvcAction = "ChoosePayment"})

error

 CS1502: The best overloaded method match for 'System.Web.WebPages.WebPageExecutingBase.Write(System.Web.WebPages.HelperResult)' has some invalid arguments

Answer 1

The problem here is that

@Html.RenderAction("ContentSection", "Portal", new {sectionAlias = "TermsAndConditions", mvcController = "Portal", mvcAction = "ChoosePayment"})

Is the equivalent to

<%= Html.RenderAction("ContentSection", "Portal", new {sectionAlias = "TermsAndConditions", mvcController = "Portal", mvcAction = "ChoosePayment"}) %>

In the the Webforms ViewEngine (which is also the same a Response.Write ). Since RenderAction returns void , you cannot Response.Write it. What you want to do is this:

@{
     Html.RenderAction("ContentSection", "Portal", new {sectionAlias = "TermsAndConditions", mvcController = "Portal", mvcAction = "ChoosePayment"});
 }

The @{ } syntax signifies a code block in the Razor view engine, which would be equivalent to the following the the Webforms ViewEngine :

<% Html.RenderAction("ContentSection", "Portal", new {sectionAlias = "TermsAndConditions", mvcController = "Portal", mvcAction = "ChoosePayment"}); %>

Answer 2

The short answer would be: use @Html.Action().

@Html.Action("ContentSection", "Portal", new {sectionAlias = "Terms", ...})

The long answer was already given by Nathan Anderson.

PS Credit for this answer really goes to James Nail, who posted it as a comment in Nathan's answer, but I found it so easy and valuable that I thought it should be an individual answer.