ASP.NET MVC 2: foreach, RenderPartial, ViewModel

I'm trying to employ a technique that I came across that seems quite clean.

Previously, my Partial had the loop inside of it. I was looping through the mode within the Partial... but then I came across an example where the foreach loop existed in the main page, while the partial was just the meat of the loop.

They accomplished it like so:

<% int index = 1; // iteration
foreach (var item in Model.Deal) { %>

     <% Html.RenderPartial("DealList", item, new ViewDataDictionary {{ "index", index }}); %>

<% i++; // increase the interation
} %>

But in my example, I'm using a ViewModel, and now that I'm in the partial, I can't access "item" like I used to be able to. Instead my only option is Model.Deal ...

What is the point of passsing "item" with the RenderParial helper if I can't access it by saying item.StoreName? Note, both the View and the Partial are strongly typed to the same ViewDataModel.

Solution

Inside of the partial "DealList" your model will be whatever item is in the main view. Inside of the partial view, Model.Deal refers to a Deal object inside of item (from the main view).

This means that your StoreName property will be accessible as Model.StoreName within your partial view.

As a side note, I put together an extension method to deal with rendering of multiple partial views so as to not require the looping.

The new method is called RenderPartials:

public static void RenderPartials(this HtmlHelper helper, string partialViewName, IEnumerable models, string htmlFormat)
        {
            foreach (var view in models.Select(model =&gt; helper.Partial(partialViewName,model)))
            {
                helper.ViewContext.HttpContext.Response.Output.Write(htmlFormat, view.ToHtmlString());
            }
        }

Using this method you can simple say:

<% Html.RenderPartials("DealList",Model.Deal); %>

inside your main view, without the loop.

There's some more information about this here which explains more about the htmlFormat parameter etc.

Hope this is helpful to you.