ASP.NET ViewBag

last modified October 18, 2023

In this article we show how to pass data betweeen controllers and views in ASP.NET with ViewBag.

ASP.NET is a cross-platform, high-performance, open-source framework for building modern, cloud-enabled, web applications. It is developed by Microsoft.

A controller is a class which handles an HTTP request sent from a client. It retrieves model data and returns a response back to the client. A view displays data and handles user interaction.

A ViewBag is a controller property which is used to pass data from controllers to views. It is used for passing weakly-typed data. ViewBag is suitable for passing small amounts of data in and out of controllers and views.

If we want to pass strongly-typed data, we can use viewmodel.

ASP.NET ViewBag example

In the following example, we show how to use ViewBag.

Program.cs

var builder = WebApplication.CreateBuilder(args);

builder.Services.AddControllersWithViews();

var app = builder.Build();

app.UseRouting();
app.UseEndpoints(endppoints =>
{
    endppoints.MapDefaultControllerRoute();
});

app.Run("http://localhost:3000");

We set up controllers and views.

Controller/HomeController.cs

using Microsoft.AspNetCore.Mvc;

namespace ViewBagEx.Controllers;

public class HomeController : Controller
{
    public IActionResult Index()
    {
        ViewBag.Now = DateTime.Now;

        return View();
    }

    [HttpGet("words")]
    public IActionResult Words()
    {
        var words = new List<string> { "red", "class", "rock", "war" };
        ViewBag.Words = words;
        
        return View();
    }
}

In the controller we have two actions. The first returns the current datetime and the second a list of words.

ViewBag.Now = DateTime.Now;

We set the current datetime to the ViewBag.

var words = new List<string> { "red", "class", "rock", "war" };
ViewBag.Words = words;

Here we set a list of strings.

Views/Home/Index.cshtml

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
    <meta charset="UTF-8">
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
    <title>Home page</title>
</head>
<body>

    <p>
        @ViewBag.Now
    </p>
    
</body>
</html>

In this view we display the current datetime. We access the bag via @ViewBag.

Views/Home/Words.cshtml

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
    <meta charset="UTF-8">
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
    <title>Words</title>
</head>
<body>

    <ul>
        @{
            foreach (var word in ViewBag.Words)
            {
                <li>@word</li>
            }
        }
    </ul>
</body>
</html>

In this view, we display the words in an HTML list. We go through the list of words in a foreach loop.

$ dotnet watch

We start the application and navigate to localhost:3000 and localhost:3000/words.

In this article we have shown how to pass data betweeen controllers and views with ViewBag.

Author

My name is Jan Bodnar, and I am a passionate programmer with extensive programming experience. I have been writing programming articles since 2007. To date, I have authored over 1,400 articles and 8 e-books. I possess more than ten years of experience in teaching programming.

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