Question

I am trying to create a partialview for my dropdownlistbox in my asp.net mvc 3 application.
in my page I have:

@Html.Action("PopulateCombo","ComboController")

controller partialview:

public ActionResult PopulateCombo()
{
    //some code here to organise data and maybe some caching
    return ItemsForCombo;
}

Is there a better way of templating a Dropdownlistbox?

Answer 1

I would populate the data in the controller, then pass it to a model and finally use an Html.DropDownListFor. I mean, that’s what MVC stands for 🙂

Example

(PS: it’s been quite a while since I not code in c# anymore so apologies for any kind of typo)

controller.cs

Public ActionResult () 
{
    Model m = new Model(); 
    //populate data into a list
    m.Items = ...

    return View(m);
} 

model.cs

...
Public List<object> Items { get; set; }

index.cshtml

@using Model // I guess it was something like this

// I cant remember the exact order of the arguments to dropdownlistfor, so just figure it out :)
@Html.DropDownListFor (some arguments)