Beginner MVC question - Correct approach to render out a List and details?
- by fizzer
I'm trying to set up a page where I display a list of items and the details of the selected item. I have it working but wonder whether I have followed the correct approach. I'll use customers as an example
I have set the aspx page to inherit from an IEnumerable of Customers. This seems to be the standard approach to display the list of items. For the Details I have added a Customer user control which inherits from customer.
I think i'm on the right track so far but I was a bit confused as to where I should store the id of the customer whose details I intend to display. I wanted to make the id optional in the controller action so that the page could be hit using "/customers" or "customers/1" so I made the arg optional and stored the id in the ViewData like this:
public ActionResult Customers(string id = "0")
{
Models.DBContext db = new Models.DBContext();
var cList = db.Customers.OrderByDescending(c => c.CustomerNumber);
if (id == "0")
{
ViewData["CustomerNumber"] = cList.First().CustomerNumber.ToString();
}
else
{
ViewData["CustomerNumber"] = id;
}
return View("Customers", cList);
}
I then rendered the User control using RenderPartial in the front end:
<%var CustomerList = from x in Model
where x.CustomerNumber == Convert.ToInt32(ViewData["CustomerNumber"])
select x;
Customer c = (Customer)CustomerList.First(); %>
<% Html.RenderPartial("Customer",c); %>
Then I just have an actionLink on each listed item:
<%: Html.ActionLink("Select", "Customers", new { id = item.CustomerNumber })%
It all seems to work but as MVC is new to me I would just be interested in others thoughts on whether this is a good approach?
