I have a Razor partial which displays my site navigation:

    @inherits Umbraco.Web.Mvc.UmbracoTemplatePage
    @{
        var home = CurrentPage.Site();
        umbraco.NodeFactory.Node navigationSettingsNode = MySite.Umbraco.NavigationSettings;
        dynamic navigationSettings = new umbraco.MacroEngines.DynamicNode(navigationSettingsNode.Id);
        var settings = home.Children.Where("DocumentTypeAlias == \"Settings\"").First();
    }


@if (navigationSettings.HasValue("topNavigation"))
{
        <ul>
            dynamic topNavigation = navigationSettings.topNavigation;
            var topNavigation2 = settings.topNavigation;
            <span>@topNavigation</span>
            <span>@topNavigation2</span>

            foreach(dynamic item in topNavigation)
            {
            <li>
                <a href="@item.link" title="@item.title">@item.caption</a>
            </li>
            }
        </ul>
}

Initially I was looping through topNavigation2 items which worked fine and with no problem.

Now I'm looping through topNavigation items and it throws an error:

Microsoft.CSharp.RuntimeBinder.RuntimeBinderException: 'char' does not contain a definition for 'link'

I don't want to use var settings anymore, I want to use only dynamic navigationSettings variable. In order to get the right node of navigationSettings I need to some operation and I don't fancy to paste the same code in every view I want to use it so I want it to be accessible from dll and available to use anywhere.

Also the navigationSettings node in my Umbraco is outside of main content tree so is not a child of Home.

Why isn't it working? Both

            dynamic topNavigation = navigationSettings.topNavigation;
            var topNavigation2 = settings.topNavigation;

produce the same json result and both are dynamic objects.

How to make it work correctly?

I'm using MVC 5.2.3