Disable layout in ASP.NET MVC?

In MonoRail you can just CancelLayout() to not render the layout. In ASP.NET MVC, the only way to affect the layout seems to be to pass the layout name into the View() method like View("myview", "mylayout"); only it seems that passing null or an empty string doesn't do what I'd want.

I ended up creating an empty layout that just rendered the content, but that seems silly.

"Not Render the layout" means exactly that. In the web forms view engine they call layouts "master pages". I want to render just my action's view and not surround it with the master page.

In MVC 3, you can remove the master layout code with:

   @{
    Layout = "";    
    }

At the beginning of view add this:

@{
    Layout = null;
}

If you want style sheet to remain, you'll need to add reference to it in that view.

To disable this for all pages, edit the _ViewStart.cshtml (in the root, under the 'Views' folder), and ensure that it contains the following:

@{
  Layout = null;
}

And to enable the template for any specific view, the following can be added to the .cshtml file for that view, to enable the template:

@{
  Layout = "~/Views/Shared/_Layout.cshtml";
}

In the Controller action we can set the required layout.

return View("Index", "_LAYOUT_NAME", model);

https://stackoverflow.com/a/5161384/2039603

I see in the right answer it says that "It seems this was impossible in the version of ASP.NET MVC"

Which version are you using? Because I found the solution (I had the same issue) to your problem

So, to Disable Layout in the page, you should use:

@{
   Layout = null;
}

And, as suggested here, this could solve your problem:

public ActionResult Index()
{
  SampleModel model = new SampleModel();
  //Any Logic
  return View("Index", "_WebmasterLayout", model);
}

Instead of using a normal view, create a partial view. These can then be used on their own, which acts very much like CancelLayout() - or you can incorporate them into a view that references the Master Page, in which case it will be the full layout. They are also useful if you want to send back a partial HTML chunk in response to an AJAX request.

Not having any luck trying to set the masterPage parameter to "" or null and returning a View (like I didn't)?

Then try this and use PartialView instead:

   public ActionResult Article(string id)
    {
        return PartialView("~/Areas/Store/Views/CustomerService/" + id);
    }

I needed to do this to load the contents of a view asynchronously from JS.

It seems this was impossible in the version of ASP.NET MVC I was asking about.

You can create a custom ActionResult that does pretty much anything. The ActionResult controls what is sent back to the client as the response. It would be trivial to create a class that extends ActionResult that does nothing.

One alternative is to actually specify a layout but make that layout empty "_EmptyLayout.cshtml" that contains nothing or just a comment that says it contains nothing so later someone sees it as intended.