Does a child action share the same ViewBag with its “parents” action?

Question

I am confused with this: I have an action ,say Parent ,and in the corresponding view file ,I have called a child action ,say Child ,both Parent and Child actions are in the

Answer 1

Child actions follow a different controller/model/view lifecycle than parent actions. As a result they do not share ViewData/ViewBag. If you want to pass parameters to a child action from the parent you could do this:

@Html.Action("Child", new { message = ViewBag.Message })

and in the child action:

public ActionResult Child(string message)
{
    ...
}

Answer 2

There is a way, but you have to create a custom abstract class as the base class for your razor views. Then expose whatever you need to from parent to child actions. This is how I get the root controller's ViewBag inside a class inheriting from WebViewPage

    private dynamic GetPageViewBag()
    {
        if (Html == null || Html.ViewContext == null) //this means that the page is root or parial view
        {
            return ViewBag;
        }
        ControllerBase controller = Html.ViewContext.Controller;

        while (controller.ControllerContext.IsChildAction)  //traverse hierachy to get root controller
        {
            controller = controller.ControllerContext.ParentActionViewContext.Controller;
        }
        return controller.ViewBag;
    }