title: Problems with RenderAction in MVC 3
body: <p>I wanted use MVC and renderpartial to generate a menu but but could not get it to work, and from what I read it seemed maybe RenderAction would be more suitable. Still I have not gotten it to work. </p>
  
  <p>What I intended to do was create a controller that selects certain articles from a database that will act as categories (this is put into HomeController):</p>
  
  <pre><code>public ActionResult MenuController()
      {
          var movies = from m in db.Art
                       where m.ArtikelNr.StartsWith("Webcat")
                       select m;
          return View(movies);
      }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>And then send that information to a view:</p>
  
  <pre><code>@model IEnumerable&lt;xxxx.Models.Art&gt;
  @{
  Layout = null;
  }
  
  &lt;ul&gt;
  @foreach (var item in Model)
  {
  &lt;li&gt;@Html.DisplayFor(modelItem =&gt; item.Benämning_10)&lt;/li&gt;
  }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p></p>
  
  <p>This works when I just run it as a normal controller and view, it returns a list of what I want. But if I want to call it from _layout.cshtml (because this menu should appear on every page) like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;div id="sidebar"&gt;@Html.RenderAction(MenuController)&lt;/div&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Then it generates the following error: </p>
  
  <pre><code>CS0103: The name 'MenuController' does not exist in the current context
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>What is the proper way of calling an action/view/whatever from the _layout.cshtml file? </p>