MVC 3 How to render a view without its layout page when loaded via ajax

Question

I am learning about Progressive Enhancement and I have a question about AJAXifying views  In my MVC 3 project I have a layout page  a viewstart page  and two plain views   The viewstart page is in the root of the Views folder and thus applies to all views  It specifies that all views should use  Layout cshtml for their layout page  The layout page contains two navigation links  one for each view  The links use  Html ActionLink   to render themselves to the page   Now I have added jQuery and want to hijack these links and use Ajax to load their content on the page dynamically    lt script type  text javascript  gt        function                  theLink   click function                    ajax                   url    this  attr  href                    type   GET                   success  function  response                            mainContent   html response                                                 return false                       lt  script gt    There are two ways I can think of to do this  but I don t particularly like either one   1  I can take the entire View s contents and place them in a partial view  then have the main view call the partial view when it is rendered  That way  using Request IsAjaxRequest   in the controller  I can return View   or return PartialView   based on whether or not the request is an Ajax request  I can t return the regular view to the Ajax request because then it would use the layout page and I d get a second copy of the layout page injected  However  I don t like this because it forces me to create empty views with just a   Html RenderPartial     in them for the standard GET requests       public ActionResult Index                 if  Request IsAjaxRequest                return PartialView  partialView            else             return View            Then in Index cshtml do this     Html RenderPartial  partialView       2  I can remove the layout designation from  viewstart and specify it manually when the request is NOT Ajax       public ActionResult Index                 if  Request IsAjaxRequest                return View       Return view with no master          else             return View  Index     Layout       Return view with master          Does anyone have a better suggestion  Is there a way to return a view without its layout page  It would be much easier to explicitly say  don t include your layout  if it is an ajax request  than it would be to explicitly include the layout if it s not an ajax

User · Answer

For a Ruby on Rails application  I was able to prevent a layout from loading by specifying  render layout  false in the controller action that I wanted to respond with ajax html

User · Answer

In   Views ViewStart cshtml          Layout   Request IsAjaxRequest     null      Views Shared  Layout cshtml       and in the controller   public ActionResult Index         return View

User · Answer

With ASP NET 5 there is no Request variable available anymore  You can access it now with Context Request  Also there is no IsAjaxRequest   Method anymore  you have to write it by yourself  for example in Extensions HttpRequestExtensions cs  using System  using Microsoft AspNetCore Http   namespace Microsoft AspNetCore Mvc       public static class HttpRequestExtensions               public static bool IsAjaxRequest this HttpRequest request                        if  request    null                                throw new ArgumentNullException nameof request                               return  request Headers    null   amp  amp   request Headers  X-Requested-With       XMLHttpRequest                        I searched for a while now on this and hope that will help some others too     Resource  https   github com aspnet AspNetCore issues 2729

User · Answer

All you need is to create two layouts   an empty layout  main layout   Then write the code below in  viewStart file        if  Request IsAjaxRequest               Layout    quot   Areas Dashboard Views Shared  emptyLayout cshtml quot           else            Layout    quot   Areas Dashboard Views Shared  Layout cshtml quot            of course  maybe it is not the best solution

User · Answer

Just put the following code on the top of the page         Layout

User · Answer

You don t have to create an empty view for this   In the controller   if  Request IsAjaxRequest      return PartialView    else   return View      returning a PartialViewResult will override the layout definition when rendering the respons

User · Answer

I prefer  and use  your  1 option  I don t like  2 because to me View   implies you are returning an entire page  It should be a fully fleshed out and valid HTML page once the view engine is done with it  PartialView   was created to return arbitrary chunks of HTML     I don t think it s a big deal to have a view that just calls a partial  It s still DRY  and allows you to use the logic of the partial in two scenarios     Many people dislike fragmenting their action s call paths with Request IsAjaxRequest    and I can appreciate that  But IMO  if all you are doing is deciding whether to call View   or PartialView   then the branch is not a big deal and is easy to maintain  and test   If you find yourself using IsAjaxRequest   to determine large portions of how your action plays out  then making a separate AJAX action is probably better

[c#] MVC 3: How to render a view without its layout page when loaded via ajax?

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