Pass a simple string from controller to a view MVC3

Question

I know this seems pretty basic  and it should be  but I cant find out where I am going wrong   I hve read other articles with similar titles on SO  and other resources on the web but still cant figure it out   so any help would be appreciated   I have a controller and in it I am setting a string variable  Now I don t mind if this takes the form of a property  an ActionResult  or a straight method  I just want a simple string that I can play with in the controller  and return it to the view   Essentially what I am trying to do is list the files in a given folder  So my logic is like this    Find the current folder  partially successful  Append the path to the where the files you want to located are  i e  if my current folder is Web  then I will append something like  Content CSS  if I wanted to list all the CSS files for example   I do this because I want to allow the user to dynamically change the site by selecting the css to apply   So it would look like   CurrentPath     Content CSS  I want load the file names into an array or list I want to pass this list to my view to render in a combo box  which is on my  Layout cshtml     It is important to know that I am trying to view the string on the  Layout cshtml as I cant just build another view for it   Unless I am wrong  in that case I would appreicate any help    At the moment I am still working on getting a simple string passed to my view in a way I can freely manipulate it like in step 2   I started off with a separate static class and a global variable   public static class MyTheme       public static string CurrentPath   HostingEnvironment MapPath           In my view I had       Html Label MyProject Web Controllers MyTheme CurrentPath    This worked but when I tried to use an if statement to determine if the string was null or empty I got errors  So my next attempts all failed   Next I decided to bring it into a controller  in this case my BaseController  and this is when I started running into problems  Code below   Inside BaseController Class      public ActionResult ThemePath                 string currentPath   Server MapPath                if  string IsNullOrEmpty currentPath                         currentPath    Error                      else                       currentPath    Our Path Is      currentPath                     return View currentPath           I dont know how to access and run this from inside my  Layout cshtml view  So next I tried a standard method inside BaseController       public string ThemePath                 string currentPath   Server MapPath                if  string IsNullOrEmpty currentPath                         currentPath    Error                      else                       currentPath    Our Path Is      currentPath                     return currentPath          Again I don t know how to access it in the view  Finally I tried to use ViewBag and ViewData and now I am just going bonkers  So in my base controller I have       public string ThemePath                 ViewBag currentPath   Server MapPath                if  string IsNullOrEmpty ViewBag currentPath                         ViewBag currentPath    Error                      else                       ViewBag currentPath    Our Path Is      ViewBag currentPath                     return ViewBag currentPath          and in my view I have        Html Label ViewBag CurrentPath     or even        Html Label ViewBag CurrentPath ToString       With the following friendly little error messages   CS1973   System Web Mvc HtmlHelper  has no applicable method named  Label  but appears to have an extension method by that name  Extension methods cannot be dynamically dispatched  Consider casting the dynamic arguments or calling the extension method without the extension method syntax   Finally I tried ViewData in the base as follows          public string ThemePath                         ViewData  currentPath     Server MapPath                if  string IsNullOrEmpty ViewData  currentPath    ToString                           ViewData  currentPath      Error                      else                       ViewData  currentPath      Our Path Is      ViewData  currentPath                       return ViewData  currentPath   ToString            and correspondingly in the  Layout cshtml I tried         Html Label ViewData  CurrentPath   ToString       Without the  ToString   I get the above error   With the  ToString   I get a null refrence execption error   So I am kinda lost now and don t really know where I am going wrong  Thanks in advance for any help

User · Answer

If you are trying to simply return a string to a View, try this:

public string Test()
{
     return "test";
}

This will return a view with the word test in it. You can insert some html in the string.

You can also try this:

public ActionResult Index()
{
    return Content("<html><b>test</b></html>");
}

User · Answer

To pass a string to the view as the Model  you can do   public ActionResult Index         string myString    This is my string       return View  object myString       You must cast it to an object so that MVC doesn t try to load the string as the view name  but instead pass it as the model  You could also write   return View  Index   myString        which is a bit more verbose   Then in your view  just type it as a string    model string   lt p gt Value   Model lt  p gt    Then you can manipulate Model how you want   For accessing it from a Layout page  it might be better to create an HtmlExtension for this   public static string GetThemePath this HtmlHelper helper        return   path-to-theme       Then inside your layout page    lt p gt Value   Html GetThemePath   lt  p gt    Hopefully you can apply this to your own scenario   Edit  explicit HtmlHelper code   namespace  lt root app namespace gt        public static class Helpers               public static string GetThemePath this HtmlHelper helper                        return System Web Hosting HostingEnvironment MapPath          path-to-theme                       Then in your view          var path   Html GetThemePath              do stuff     Or       lt p gt Path   Html GetThemePath   lt  p gt   Edit 2   As discussed  the Helper will work if you add a  using statement to the top of your view  with the namespace pointing to the one that your helper is in

User · Answer

Why not create a viewmodel with a simple string parameter and then pass that to the view   It has the benefit of being extensible  i e  you can then add any other things you may want to set in your controller  and it s fairly simple   public class MyViewModel       public string YourString   get  set        In the view   model MyViewModel  Html Label model   gt  model YourString    In the controller  public ActionResult Index           myViewModel   new MyViewModel         myViewModel YourString    However you are setting this        return View myViewModel

User · Answer

Use ViewBag  ViewBag MyString    some string   return View      In your View   lt h1 gt  ViewBag MyString lt  h1 gt    I know this does not answer your question  it has already been answered   but the title of your question is very vast and can bring any person on this page who is searching for a query for passing a simple string to View from Controller

User · Answer

Just define your action method like this  public string ThemePath     and simply return the string itself

User · Answer

Steve Hobbs  answer is probably the best  but some of your other solutions could have worked   For example    Html Label ViewBag CurrentPath   will probably work with an explicit cast  like  Html Label  string ViewBag CurrentPath     Also  your reference to currentPath in  Html Label ViewData  CurrentPath   ToString     is capitalized  wherein your other code it is not  which is probably why you were getting null reference exceptions

[c#] Pass a simple string from controller to a view MVC3

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