Question

I need a quick sanity check. I’m trying to design my views such that they are clean, concise, and as free from any sort of conditional logic as possible. However, I’m having a hard time ridding them of all conditional statements. I’m wondering if having some conditional statements in views is unavoidable?

For example:

@if (Model.UserCanEdit)
{
    <button type="button" id="Edit">Edit</button>
}

There are not many options if you have a view that has several elements that can change or be shown/hidden depending on various conditions.

So what guidelines should I follow regarding where to draw the line on allowing conditional logic in your views? What are some ways to reduce conditional logic in my views that I may not be thinking of?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I wouldn’t say that it is all bad using conditionals in Views – after all the main purpose of a view is actually displaying data from your Model. (And some times conditional statements are required to display the data.)

However – using an abundance of
conditionals can make maintenance a
nightmare and eventually readability.
It’s important to remember to not
include conditionals to the extent of
becoming business logic, but allow
them to serve their purpose as
“presentation logic”.

Possible Alternatives:

Custom HTML Helpers:

If you aren’t crazy about using conditionals – you can look into using Helpers to clean up things a bit. For more information on that check out Creating Custom HTML Helpers.

Additional Views / Partial Views:

Also, as many will point out – using conditionals to make a single view function as multiple views should is not the best way to tackle that issue.