ASP.net MVC3 View inheritance

Question

I've got a list of for example Vehicle's that I want to render in a single page, but have different view characteristics for each vehicle type.

Vehicle
- VehicleId
- VehicleTypeId (Car/Boat/Truck/etc...)
- Description
- ...

I'd like to on my main AllVehiclesPage

@foreach(var vehicle in Model) //where Model is a List<Vehicle> from AllVehicles
{
    //Render proper View
    //CarView(vehicle)
    //BoatView(vehicle)
    //TruckView(vehicle)
}

In each view it will render differently depending on the vehicle, IE Wheel rim size applies to cars/trucks not to boats etc...

I've read a number of the other questions on Stackoverflow about view inheritance, but they don't seem to apply.

Is this best to do with partial Views? Should I create Usercontrols?

Darin Dimitrov · Accepted Answer · 2012-07-13 13:34:30Z

9

Use display templates. Replace your entire foreach loop with the following line of code:

@model IEnumerable<Vehicle>
...
@Html.DisplayForModel()

And now comes the interesting part. You define display templates for each type that you want to handle:

~/Views/Shared/DisplayTemplates/Car.cshtml
~/Views/Shared/DisplayTemplates/Boat.cshtml
~/Views/Shared/DisplayTemplates/Truck.cshtml

Each template will be strongly typed to the corresponding concrete type. So here's what will happen on the Html.DisplayForModel() line:

ASP.NET MVC sees that the model is an IEnumerable<Vehicle>
ASP.NET MVC starts enumerating over this collection
For each element of the collection ASP.NET MVC looks at its concrete runtime type.
ASP.NET MVC looks for a corresponding display template for this type defined in the ~/Views/Shared/DisplayTemplates folder and automatically renders it by passing this template the current element as model.

You will notice something interesting in this pattern: I use the word ASP.NET MVC very much instead of the word the .NET developer. That's nifty because all that the developer has to do is follow the standard conventions and then ASP.NET MVC will do the job for him so that this developer doesn't need to write loops, doesn't need to write if conditions and doesn't need to reinvent wheels.

edited Jul 13, 2012 at 13:34

answered Jul 12, 2012 at 19:30

Darin Dimitrov

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3 Comments

Nathan Koop Over a year ago

I'm still learning MVC, would this link be a good plact to learn display templates? bradwilson.typepad.com/blog/2009/10/…

Darin Dimitrov Over a year ago

That is absolutely magnificent place to learn. Brad Wilson is one of the greatest.

general exception Over a year ago

@DarinDimitrov This would only work if OP was using inheritance between his abstract Vehicle object and his Car/Boat/Truck implementations though wouldn't it ? It seems to me that OP actually has a List<Vehicle> but wants to select which template to use based on it's VehicleTypeId property, and not by the Type of object.

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