How to access properties in the model passed to the view?

I'm sending the following model to my view.

return View(new { url = returnUrl });

In the view, I'm don't want to specify any particular class for my object (since I wish to keep it flexible and elastic for now). So, the @Model is the apparently an object and as such, it's got no url property. Hence the error.

Additional information: 'object' does not contain a definition for 'url'

Now, I do know that the thing inside the object has url property. I have assigned it to it and I also see it when watching the variable as the exception's been thrown.

My question is how to access the field. Is my only option declaring a class and type the model using @model Something? I can't use as keyword to type it to var...

In "plain" C# we can do something like this.

var some = new {thing = "poof"};
string output = some.thing;

How do I do the equivalent of it in CSHTML file under Razor?

Solution

Strongly-typed view models are the way to go. Create a type that suits the needs of the view and treat reusability/duplication as a secondary concern.

However, let me explain why your attempt did not work.

It is legal to pass an anonymous type--even between assemblies^[1]--as long as it is cast to object. In fact, the MVC framework assemblies consume anonymous types in many helper methods. Those anonymous types are then evaluated using reflection (optimized by caching).

^{1: I believe there are some caveats to this, and it certainly isn't good practice in most cases.}

A view is compiled into a class so that it can be executed. Part of the class's contract is the type of model it expects, as indicated by @model in your view markup.

This presents a problem with anonymous types, as you cannot indicate their type in your view and type object doesn't expose the properties you set when declaring the type. Thus, you end up with a view that only knows that its model is an object.

Again, use strongly-typed models, or the ViewBag if you truly only need one or two values.

However, to prove that the anonymous type can be passed to the view, look at this (horrible) example:

Controller

return View( new { property1 = "hello world"} );

View

@model object
@{
    var rvd = new RouteValueDictionary( Model );
}

@rvd["property1"]

We passed an anonymous type to the view as an object, and then read the object's properties using RouteValueDictionary.