viewdata

The initial situation is that I map my domain model into a presentation model. I have to display an update/create formular with textboxes and a dropdownlist. Should the viewmodel contain a list for the dropdownlist or should I pass the data for the dropdownlist by using ViewData? When should I use ViewData and when should I not use it? Shall input fields like dropdownlists have a seperate view model? I tend to try and use ViewData as little as possible since you always need to cast values, you need to do error checking for nulls or for keys that don't exist and it clutters the views in my

I'm trying to pass ViewData to my asp.net mvc masterpage for an mvc usercontrol that I keep on a masterpage. For example, I created a dropdownlist of names as an mvc usercontrol and I put that in my masterpage. The problem I am running into is passing the ViewData to the masterpage. I found this article from Microsoft which has a decent solution but I was wondering if there are other "better" solutions out there. The thing I don't like about the solution in the link is that I have to change every controller to inherit from a new controller class. http://www.asp.net/learn/MVC/tutorial-13-cs

When a user log in into my application i want to show his name throughout the whole application. I am using the asp.net MVC framework. But what i don't want is that is have to put in every controller something like: ViewData["User"] = Session["User"]; This because you may not repeat yourself. (I believe this is the DRY [Don't Repeat Yourself] principle of OO programming.) The ViewData["User"] is on my masterpage. So my question is, what is a neat way to handle my ViewData["User"] on one place? You can do this fairly easily in either a controller base-class, or an action-filter that is applied

I have been scratching my head about this for a few days, and I am not sure if it is an issue with my environment or the code itself basing this on being to ASP.NET MVC (although I have 5 years experience in C#). I am using a recent clean install of Win7x64 and VS 2008 with all the patches. I have raw HTML stored in a database table that is selectively loaded by the controller based on a few rules which I do not have control over. Unfortunately when attempt to stuff the value into a view data in the control like such: ViewData["HTMLData"] = DAO.HTMLDataGet(); When I see the output, it is

I am trying to find out how to use usercontrols in asp.net mvc. I know how to add a usercontrol to a view and how to pass data to it. What I haven't been able to figure out is how do you do this without having to retrieve and pass the data in every single controller? For example, if I have a user control that displays the most recent posts on several but not all the pages in the site, how do I write the Controllers so that I get data for that usercontrol and pass it to the user control from only one place in the web site instead of getting and passing data in each of the different controllers

when do you think is it better to use ViewData over a view model? I have the same exact partial view in a couple of main views. I'd like to control how a partial view is rendered but I'd also prefer the partial view to accept only a view model which is a collection of records, just a pure IEnumerable<> object. I'd rather avoid to send the full view model object from a main view because it also contains a lot of different properties, objects, that control paging, sorting, filtering etc. Therefore the question is if I should create another view model for the partial view or is it ok to use