Question

I’m not able to get a clear answer on my problem: I want to have one partial view but have 3 distinct code blocks within the partial with similar (not exactly the same) content. So that whatever view page is loaded will determine which of the 3 code blocks is displayed in the partial view.

I did something similar back in MVC2, but it was on the controller level (controller determined which of the 3 code blocks was displayed). Now I have a need to go deeper and do it on the page level.

I understand that a bunch of if/else statements in a view is not the MVC convention. But honestly, that’s the only way I know how to do it. An alternative is to keep this if/else logic and create more than one controller and keep doing it the old way.

Can anyone point me in the right direction?

Answer 1

If your partial view looks something like this

<div>...Generic stuff used all the time...</div>
...
<div>...special block used only in some circumstances...</div>
...
<div>...another special block used only in some other circumstance...</div>
...etc...

You can design a ViewModel class which has some properties to determine which block of code to show

e.g.

public class MyViewModel 
{
   public bool ShowBlockOne { get; set; }
   public bool ShowBlockTwo { get; set; }
}

Then, your partial view would look something like this

@model MyViewModel 
<div>...Generic stuff used all the time...</div>
...
@if (Model.ShowBlockOne) {
    <div>...special block used only in some circumstances...</div>
}
...
@if (Model.ShowBlockTwo) {
    <div>...another special block used only in some other circumstance...</div>
}
...etc...

And the views calling the Partial View would use Html.RenderPartial, and would pass a MyViewModel with the properties set, depending upon what they wanted to show. e.g.

@{ Html.RenderPartial("MyPartial", new MyViewModel { ShowBlockOne = true } ); }

You should be able to use some variation of this.

As you will be aware, you should keep logic to a minimum in your Views, but the occasional if/then is OK.