Reputation: 55729

What is the difference between a View and a PartialView in ASP.NET MVC?

At first glance the need for both seems non-obvious to me.

Upvotes: 42

Answers (7)

Ragab Mohamad

Reputation: 708

View in Core Mvc

View Contains The layout Page(_ViewStart) Or Layout Property.

@{ Layout="_Layout"; }

Before Any View Rendered _ViewStart is Rendered.
View might have markup tags As

<!DOCTYPE html>   
 <html>
     <head>
     </head>
     <body>    
     </body> 
  </html>

View isn't Lightwight as Partial View.
View will Render in Layout by used @RenderBody() Method (Views/Shared/_Layout.cshtml).
Calling by use return View() inside Action.

Partial View

Partial view doesn't Contain Layout Page Layout Property
It does not verify for a viewstart.cshtml. We cannot put common code for a partial view within the viewStart.cshtml.page.
In MVC Partial view is designed specially to render within the view
We can pass a regular view to the RenderPartial method.

@{await Html.PartialAsync("Partial"); }

Example To Demo Partial View Is Strongly Type

in View

@model List<Student>;
@{
    Layout = "_Layout";
}  
 
<div>@await Html.PartialAsync("Partial",Model)</div>

in Partial View

@model List<Student>; <ul>
     @foreach (Student student in Model)
     {
        <li>@student.ID</li>
        <li>@student.Name</li>
        <li>@student.Age</li>
     }
 
     </ul>

SP.NET Core MVC looks for Partial View in the same way like Regular Views (i.e. in Views/ and Views/Shared folders). This means you can create controller specific partial views or shared partial views.

Good Luck

Upvotes: 0

ThiagoVBDiniz

Reputation: 111

It works like that:

return View() the view content goes in the @RenderBody() of the /Shared/_Layout.cshtml
return PartialView() it returns only the view content

Upvotes: 11

Dariusz Tarczynski

Reputation: 16711

Look at StackOverflow.com site: Main site (View) contains components like:

Tags
Related
Ad

So Tags, related, Ad etc. can be composed as PartialViews. The advantage of this is that PartialViews can be simply cached by OutputCache instead of recreating all site: performance gain.

Upvotes: 3

Aaronaught

Reputation: 122644

In theory, the answer is: A partial view is a "sub-view" that you embed within a main view - something that you might reuse across multiple views, like a sidebar.

In practice, the answer is: Very little.

In theory, partial views are more lightweight than standard views, but it's perfectly OK to pass a "regular" view to RenderPartial and the performance seems to be exactly the same. I frequently use regular .aspx views as "partial" views because you can make them reference a master view in order to provide templated content like what you can do with UserControls in ASP.NET WebForms. See here.

Partial views are more like web parts on a portal - they are completely self-contained objects. Use them if the layout is simple and static, or if you're annoyed by the Intellisense errors when you don't have the <html> and <body> tags in a standard View.

Upvotes: 43

Tim Hoolihan

Reputation: 12396

Views are the general result of a page that results in a display. It's the highest level container except the masterpage. While a partial view is for a small piece of content that may be reused on different pages, or multiple times in a page.

If you're coming from webforms, view is similar to a web content form, while a partial view is like a user control.

Upvotes: 6