Determine the model of a partial view from the controller within MVC

Question

My current problem is that I have a partial view that I want to determine what model is being used by it.

I have had to deal with a few strange scenarios for my pro

Answer 1

I blogged about doing exactly this. Please see http://blogs.planetcloud.co.uk/mygreatdiscovery/?tag=/widget

Essentially I built out a similar widget system. The posts also cover how to handle configuration of those widgets. This makes use of the dynamic support in Mvc3 so that any model object can be passed to the view, from a single controller action.

By default all widgets have a collection of KVP properties (I believe this is what the OP has). So for a simple widget we get access to those properties from within the view. I used for a widget that displayed some html (where the html was stored in one of those properties).

However, for more complex widgets we implement IWidgetWithDisplayModel. This tells us that before we pass the loaded widget back to the view, we need to "build" our display model.

Here's the controller action that does that. Check the posts for full details.

[HttpGet]
public ActionResult Get(string name)
{
    var widget = widgetService.GetWidgetBySystemName(name, true);

    if (widget == null)
        return Content(string.Format("Widget [{0}] not found!", name));

    if (!this.ViewExists(widget.WidgetName))
        return Content(string.Format("A template for widget [{0}] was not found.", widget.WidgetName));

    if (widget is IWidgetWithDisplayModel) {
        (widget as IWidgetWithDisplayModel).CreateDisplayModel();
    }

    return PartialView(widget.WidgetName, widget);
}