Question

I’m trying to find a better way to use a div table with ASP.NET MVC, the problem I see is that you need to do loads of looping, rather than one loop if I had to use a traditional <table> table.

Example

<div class="column">
  <div class="row">Name</div>
    <% foreach (Person person in (List<Person>)ViewData.Model) {%>
      <div class="row"><%= Html.Encode(person.Name) %></div>
    <%} %>
  </div>
<div class="column">
  <div class="row">Email</div>
    <% foreach (Person person in (List<Person>)ViewData.Model) {%>
      <div class="row"><%= Html.Encode(person.Email) %></div>
    <%} %>
  </div>
<div class="column">
  <div class="row">Phone</div>
    <% foreach (Person person in (List<Person>)ViewData.Model) {%>
      <div class="row"><%= Html.Encode(person.Phone) %></div>
    <%} %>
  </div>

Answer 1

If it looks like a table and smells like a table why not use a table?

But if you want to do it in this way well try to build a extention method for your Html property that generates this html code and have the list as a parameter and maybe a list for your columns, To generate your html code you can use the TagBuilder class.