Question

We are using a friendly Name URL route scheme. Basically using a combination of the Principal Identity and a friendly name this can be mapped back to an identity internally (Person ID). So a route like this:

    routes.MapRoute(string.Empty, "{friendlyname}/Products/{action}", new {controller = "Products", action = "List"});

Would map to a URL like this:

    Adam/Products/List

This all works fine and abstracts away the internal Id of the named person which is required as well.

The problem is our Views are comprised of many partial views. When there are rendered by using the @Html.Action method they ultimately need the PersonID but from the URL we only have the ‘friendly name’.

I have thought about this for a while and there are two solutions to my mind:

1. Pass the ‘friendly name’ into each of the controller action methods that return the partial views and internally the method will have to do a lookup on the currently logged in identity and the friendly name. This will give the PersonID to me and I can then efficiently query from then on. The only problem with this apporach is that due to the multiple partial views I will be querying on the currently logged in identity and friendly name for each partial view call which is innefficeint and I feel I should only have to write this code once.

2. Somehow query in the view and get the PersonID so it can be passed to each @Html.Action call so the partial view controller methods will not have to do that lookup themselves saving round trips to the database for the same shared informtion. The problem with this is that I am not sure of a way of doing this cleanley in the view using the DI that we use through the rest of the application.

Any thoughts on approach to would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you,

Adam

Answer 1

You could add the Id to the session variables and access it from within the views with:

@{var personId = int.Parse(Session["PersonId"])}

Then you can pass it directly to partial views from the Parent without it hitting the client or having to pass parameters to any controllers.

Update

You could also access the session variable from the Controller if you wanted to do the work there instead without roundtripping to the database.

EDIT

If you put the property in a model and pass it to a page that post’s back then the model will not persist between posts.

If for example your controller does:

[HttpPost]
public ActionResult DoSomething(ViewModel model)
{
   if(ModelState.IsValid)
   {
       // Logic Here
   }
   return View(model)
}

when the page is reloaded, the model will have forgotten about the ID.

There are a couple of ways around this. Either use @Html.HiddenFor(m => m.ID)
which will put the property in the rendered HTML, which if it is truely a sensitive piece of information, is bad.

Or you can rebuild the view model on each subsequent postback.

Hope this helps