ASP.NET Core MVC Interview Question #161

What are View Components and when are they preferable to partial views?

Testing, AJAX/JavaScript Integration, Localization & Advanced MVC Senior Advanced

Quick Interview Answer

A partial view is mainly reusable Razor markup and receives data from its caller. A View Component is a reusable rendering component with its own invocation logic and can obtain the data needed to render itself.

Detailed Explanation

A partial view is mainly reusable Razor markup and receives data from its caller. A View Component is a reusable rendering component with its own invocation logic and can obtain the data needed to render itself.

View Components are useful for UI elements such as navigation menus, shopping-cart summaries, or dashboard widgets that require their own data-loading or presentation workflow. They do not participate in normal controller action routing.

Code Example

public class CartSummaryViewComponent : ViewComponent
{
    public async Task<IViewComponentResult> InvokeAsync()
    {
        var model = await LoadCartAsync();
        return View(model);
    }
}