Question

I’m working on a ASP.NET MVC 3 application, but I’m rather new to MVC in general.

I have a partial view in a my application layout view that needs to have data passed to it. this will appear on every page. Is there a way to make this happen so I don’t have to load that data into the view model for every action in the entire site?

As in, if a user navigates to Mysite/admin/settings, I would like to have the partial view on the layout be able to somehow receive the data that it needs without me needing to put that code in the Settings action in the Admin controller.

On this same note, how do you pass data to the layout view of an application anyway?

Answer 1

In these situations I usually use a base ViewModel for my Views

public class ApplicationViewModel
{
  public string UserName {get; set;}
  ....
}

public class SettingsViewModel : ApplicationViewModel
{
}

all your views would inherit from that ViewModel. Your layout would expect it as well

_layout.cshtml:

@model ApplicationViewModel
....

<h1>hello @Model.UserName</h1>

hopefully this answers your question