Question

For my site I want to implement a banner control that will be on the left side of the site.
The banners will be stored in html in the database and each one will have a rating. Then using the rating each one will have a number of occurrences (percentage).

1. Do you think that there is a feasible solution to put all this flow in a separate dll? Is that even possible in the mvc architecture. I would prefer to do it as a partial view and have everything in a separate dll the partial view and the data access layer. Do you think that this is a good solution?

2. What is your approach when you have to implement a “user control” (partial view) … do you put it in the website project or a separate project?

3. Is there any other way to implement this instead of using a partial view?

Thanks, Radu

Answer 1

There’s a few choices that you have-

1. do it as a HtmlHelper extension. Probably not ideal for this kind of thing as the managementof the banners to display and the associated logic is really the concern of the banner component/widget/partial.

2. Do it as a partial view and use Html.RenderPartial(object Model) to call it. Now the logic is in the partial view, but there may also be some application logic that shouldn’t really be going into the view and really belongs in the model or the controller. Also, you can end up with fat view models being passed to the main view that have to also carry a view model for each partial rendered in the main view. I think in some situations this isn’t ideal, particularly when the data in the view models for the partials has nothing to do with the data for the main view. Which brings us to…

3. Do it as a child action with an associated controller and partial view. The logic will be nicely encapsulated in the controller and the partial view will simply render out whatever it’s passed from the BannerController.

You could certainly put this in a separate assembly and set it up as a Portable area. This way, you can embed the partial views in the assembly and to reuse the widget would be a case of just dropping the assembly in the bin folder and referencing it in your main application project (you may also need to set up some configuration perhaps).

Whether I would personally do it this way or not depends on reuse for the component; to be honest, I’d probably set it up inside of an area in the main application to begin with and then, if I find that I need to reuse it, move it out to a portable area.

I also generally like to keep the data access logic in a separate assembly and use the repository pattern along with IoC to inject repositories for doing data access into controllers.