How do I load views independent of the site.master?

Question

I'm preparing an application I wrote in ASP.Net MVC for some light Ajax-y stuff. Basically, I want users to be able to go to different parts of the page without it reloading.

To do this I want to be able to reload the body of my page.

My site master is broken down into a head body and foot div. I want to be able to use something like $("body").load(whateverlink) to refresh the body, but in my case doing this causes the website to be rendered inside the body.

How can I do this successfully?

EDIT: The page is made up of views, not partialviews. In theory I could go and convert all my pages to partials but I'm looking for a way around that if possible. Thanks

Answer 1

You can get your controllers to return partial views, using JQuery to do a request and update a div with your page content:

JQuery:

function navigate(url){
  $.ajax({
    url: "/Home/Index",
    cache: false,
    success: function(html){
       $("#content").html(html);
      }
   });
}

Controller:

public class HomeController : Controller
{    
    public void Index()
    {
       return this.PartialView();
    }
}

Answer 2

There is a helpful article on BrightMix which might help. It basically renders a partial to a string, which you could then return as part of a ContentResult.