Question

I’m trying to add a navigational menu for my project which uses the ASP.NET framework and C# programming language. My solution is to create a widget which can populate a partial view when called from the master page.
In the widget’s action method, how do I add Links or Controller-Action combinations to the ViewDataDictionary?

— Edit : Here is my code, after your suggestion

public class NavController : Controller
{
    public ActionResult Menu()
    {           
        List<ActionLink> navLinks = new List<ActionLink>();
        navLinks.Add(new ActionLink() { Text = "Home", ActionName = "Index", ControllerName = "Home" });
        return View(navLinks);          
    }
}

The partial view file looks like the following:

<%@ Control Language="C#"  Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewUserControl<List<Microsoft.Web.Mvc.Controls.ActionLink>>" %>

<% foreach(var link in Model) { %>
<%= link %>
<%}  %>

But the output of all this is simply ‘Microsoft.Web.Mvc.Controls.ActionLink’ and not the link which I want.

Thanks.

Answer 1

The actionlink is a mvc control of some sort that would be the result of parsing a tag and would then be added to the controls collection of the page.

You have 2 options to achieve your goal, pass in the complete links ( i.e. the fully formed anchor tag ) which you could generate in your controller using Html.ActionLink( linkText, actionName) or pass the details of the link to your partial and use those details to generate the links ( i.e. pass an enumeration of elements containing the details of your links ).

Personally I prefer the second approach as it separates the navigation logic from the rendering.

Somewhere in your code …

public class NavigationLink
{
  public string Text;
  public string Controller;
  public string Action;
  // ... any other properties you want to pass
}

Somewhere in your controller …

public ActionResult Menu
{
  var links = new List<NavigationLink>
  {
    new NavigationLink
    {
      Text = "Home",
      Controller = "Home",
      Action = "Index"
    },
    new NavigationLink
    {
      Text = "Logout",
      Controller = "Authentication",
      Action = "Logout"
    }
  };

  return View( links );
}

Somewhere in your view …

<%@ Control Language="C#"  Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewUserControl<List<NavigationLink>>" %>

<% foreach(var link in Model) { %>
<%= Html.ActionLink( link.Text, link.Action, link.Controller ) %>
<%}  %>