Question

What areas get affected by it?

code readability? maintainability? performance? security? any other?

my views have been using something like

if(Model.Showthis) {<div id = "showthis">...</div>} }

and does doing something like the following have security implications? —

<%if (HttpContext.Current.User.Identity.IsAuthenticated && item.Poster.UserName == HttpContext.Current.User.Identity.Name)%>
<%{%>
...
<%}%>

yes I read "if" considered harmful in ASP.NET MVC View (.aspx) files? too, but it didn’t exactly specify what areas get affected by it. I mean I wanted to make sure there are no security and performance implications, which the link didn’t answer exactly

Answer 1

I don’t see an issue with it as long as the branching logic is purely for UI concerns. With that in mind I would change your second if to:

<%if (item.Poster.UserName == Model.CurrentUserName)%>
<%{%>
...
<%}%>

And set your model up so that the CurrentUserName property looks like this:

public string CurrentUserName
{
    get
    {
        return HttpContext.Current.User.Identity.IsAuthenticated
            ? HttpContext.Current.User.Identity.Name
            : String.Empty;
    }
}

Or even better if you’re going to be checking author against current user a lot in your system, offload that property to a helper class that can be reused from multiple models. Basically I wanted to get the implementation detail of what the current user’s name is out of the view.