15.7. Using Child Actions

Child actions are action methods invoked from within a view. This lets you avoid repeating controller logic that you want to use in several places in the application. Child actions are to actions as partial views are to views.

You might want to use a child action whenever you want to display some data-driven "widget" that appears on multiple pages and contains data unrelated to the main action that is running. We used this technique in the SportsStore example to include a data-driven navigation menu on every page, without needing to supply the navigation data directly from every action method. The navigation data was supplied independently by the child action.