Question

In the partial view I have to access Session variable LoginInfo which holds a LoginInfo object. I tried the following:

@LoginInfo info = @(LoginInfo)Session["LoginInfo"]

But it gives me compiler errors. What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

What am I doing wrong?\

Many things. The first thing you did wrong is the Razor syntax. It should be:

@{ LoginInfo info = (LoginInfo)Session["LoginInfo"]; }

But that’s just the syntax. You have a far bigger problem. You have a design problem. You are violating the MVC pattern.

A view should not try to fetch any data. A view uses data that is passed to it from the controller action under the form of a view model.

So you define a view model:

public class MyViewModel
{
    public LoginInfo LoginInfo { get; set; }
}

then you have a controller action:

public ActionResult Foo()
{
    var model = new MyViewModel();
    model.LoginInfo = (LoginInfo)Session["LoginInfo"];
    return View(model);
}

then you have a strongly typed view in which you use the view model:

@model MyViewModel
<div>Hello @Model.LoginInfo.FirstName</div>

But in this case (given the name of the class LoginInfo) I suppose that you are trying to display some common widget on all views. That would be a great candidate for using the Html.Action helper.

So you define controller action that will fetch this information from some data source (Session in your case):

[ChildActionOnly]
public ActionResult LoginInfo()
{
    var model = (LoginInfo)Session["LoginInfo"] ?? new LoginInfo();
    return PartialView(model);
}

and then you define a corresponding partial:

@model LoginInfo
<div>Hello @Model.FirstName @Model.LastName</div>

and finally in your _layout you can include this widget somewhere:

@Html.Action("LoginInfo", "SomeController")