Question

Hi i’m having problems with this. I am developing an asp.net mvc 2 application. I have a partial view menu.ascx defined. this gets included on all the pages of my site in the Site.Master masterpage. Now the thing is I want my menu to change according to the type of user.
Here’s what I did at first:

<%@ Control Language="C#" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewUserControl<dynamic>" %>
<li><%: Html.ActionLink("Home", "Index", "Home")%></li>
<% 
    ExtendedMemberShip.MemberShipUser user = ExtendedMemberShip.MemberShip.GetUser(HttpContext.Current.User.Identity.Name);
    string course = "Course/Index/";
    if(user != null) course += user.UserName;
%>
<% 
     if(user!=null && user.Type == "stud") { 
%>
         <li><%: Html.ActionLink("Courses", "Index", course)%></li>
<% 
      }
%>
<li><%: Html.ActionLink("Votes", "About", "Home")%></li>
<li><%: Html.ActionLink("Comments", "About", "Home")%></li>
<li><%: Html.ActionLink("Exam archives", "About", "Home")%></li>

The problem with this is that I shouldn’t be doing this in the view ! But since this is the MasterPage no controller actually calls it so I don’t know where to put the info in the ViewData dictionnary or ViewModel to pass it to this masterpage…
any ideas?

Answer 1

You can still do this in your controller. Populate your the relevant data into the ViewData dictionary:

public ActionResult Any()
{
    LoadUserType();
    return View();
}

private void LoadUserType()
{
    ExtendedMemberShip.MemberShipUser user = 
        ExtendedMemberShip.MemberShip.GetUser(HttpContext.Current.User.Identity.Name);
    ViewData["UserType"] = user.Type;
}

In your master page use:

<% Html.RenderPartial("Menu", ViewData["UserType"]) %>

You could avoid having to call LoadUserType() or whatever by creating a Custom Attribute that did that for you, or putting it in a base class that all of your controllers extended.

Alternatively, you could just populate the menu items as part of the Model and pass the Model to the PartialView.