ASP.NET MVC View User Control - how to set IDs?

Question

I need a dropdown list on my page that will allow a user to select their state. Since this is probably a control that will be used elsewhere, I thought it would be a good idea

Answer 1

Well you can pass object data to the RenderPartial method in conjunction to the User Control to render, so you could easily do the following:

<%= Html.RenderPartial("/someDirectory/SomeControl.ascx", "MyID") %>

and in the UserControl do the following:

....


Just to be sure, a better way to handle it is to make a simple DTO (data transfer object) to hold that information so you can pass more information to your user control, that you will inevitably need.

Example:


class ComboData 
{
   string ID {get;set;}
   string CssClass {get;set;}
   //Other stuff here
}



<%
var comboData = new ComboData {ID = "myID", CssClass = "comboStyle" }

%>

<%= Html.RenderPartial("/someDirectory/SomeControl.ascx", comboData) %>




....

Make sure you set the Code behind for the user control to be a generic of type ComboData for this example.