ASP.NET MVC – Database Driven Menu

You need to use the Html.RenderPartial method in your master page.

You will need to set the MainMenuSortListDisplay and SubMenuSortListDisplay view data keys in whatever action is calling the view that uses your master page.

In your master use this

<% Html.RenderPartial("~/Views/Shared/Menu.ascx");

The path needs to be the app relative path to the control's folder. Typically these go under Shared. You can make the structure how you want below the Shared folder.

To make this technique stronger, use a strongly typed partial. In the question you would perhaps make a new class (MenuModel) with two generic collections as properties and place it in the models folder of the application. Then in the model's constructor call a method that populates the lists.

public class MenuModel
{
   public IEnumerable<MainMenuSort> OuterList {get; set;}
   public IEnumerable<SubMEnuSort> InnerList {get; set;}
   public MenuModel()
   {
       VoidThatFillsTheInnerAndOuterList();
   }

This will mean that you can do this in your controller

public ActionResult ShowAForm()
{
   ViewData["MenuPartialData"] = new MenuModel();
   return View();
}

Having set this key, your master page can use the overload of RenderPartial, like this

<% Html.RenderPartial(
    "~/View/Shared/Menu.ascx", 
    (MenuModel)ViewData["MenuPartialData"]); %>

This assumes that your partial is strongly typed to the MenuModel class. Then in the partial you can use the model which rewrites your code slightly

<% foreach (MainMenuSort mainMenuSort in Model.OuterList) { %>
     <li><%= Html.Encode(mainMenuSort.MainMenuId.MainMenuName)%></li>
     <% foreach (SubMenuSort subMenuSort in Model.InnerList) {%>            
        <%if (mainMenuSort.MainMenuId.Id == subMenuSort.SubMenuId.MainMenu.Id)  
        { %>              
           <li><%= Html.Encode(subMenuSort.SubMenuId.SubMenuName)%></li>
      <%} %>
     <%} %>      
    <%}%>

Hope that helps

Try something like

<% Html.RenderPartial("Menu") %>

EDIT: Corrected a typo

You could also do it as a HTMLHelper and in the MasterPage just call <%= Html.Menu() %>. Then in your HTMLHelper you have the code to get the database records and loop through them. Here is a link I found to get you started. Note my comments as there is a bug in the code example provided. I'm still having issues handling subitems of menus, I guess I need a recursive function or something??