.NET MVC Call method on different controller

Can anybody tell me how to call a method on a different controller from within an action method? I don't want to redirect. I want to call a method on a different controller that returns a string and use the response within my action method.

Solution 1:

Sounds in my ears like you should refactor your application, and extract the functionality that generates the string out to a new seperate class (or reuse an existing class, if you have one that fits) and let both controllers use that class.

Solution 2:

You can use the following approach to invoke a method on the other controller:

var otherController = DependencyResolver.Current.GetService<OtherController>();
var result = otherController.SomeMethod();

This worked for me in ASP.NET MVC5. Hope that it will work for you as well.

Solution 3:

You can achieve this via the Action method of HtmlHelper.

In a view, you would do it like this:

@Html.Action("OtherAction")

However it's not straightforward to obtain an instance of HtmlHelper in an action method (by design). In fact it's such a horrible hack that I am reluctant to even post it...

var htmlHelper = new HtmlHelper(new ViewContext(
                                      ControllerContext, 
                                      new WebFormView(ControllerContext, "HACK"),
                                      new ViewDataDictionary(),
                                      new TempDataDictionary(),
                                      new StringWriter()),
                                new ViewPage());

var otherViewHtml = htmlHelper.Action("ActionName", "ControllerName");

This works on MVC 3. You might need to remove the StringWriter arg from the ViewContext constructor for MVC 2, IIRC.

</hack>