When is it “acceptable” to use ViewBag/ViewData in ASP.NET MVC?

Question

I realize that the best practice is to use strongly typed Views and pass in all needed data in a ViewModel, but I am curious if there are situations where it is actually conside

Answer 1

i can't say about best practice but i mostly use it when using Editor Templates. e.g if i want to display a dropdown list for editing certain field i make following editor template

<%:Html.DropDownList("GetIDHere", new SelectList((IEnumerable)ViewData["xyz"]),"select Author")%>

Then you put UIHint attribute on BookID field of your model for instance

public class Book
{
    public int BookID{get;set;}
    [UIHint("mytemplate")]
    public int AuthorID{get;set;}
}

in such cases, i assume, its particularly fine and clean to use ViewData. this is the way Telerik asp.net mvc projects have coded in their demo projects demo