MVC conditionally displaying items

Question

I have a partial (user control) that shows a menu of links. It lives on my masterpage. If you are an admin, you should see a different menu from others.

I have a method in my Member class called: IsAdmin(). Normally it would be very easy to just put some logic in the partial declaratively to show the right menu if someone is an admin, such as:

<% if (member.IsAdmin()) { %>

But since I am using Ninject for dependency injection and my Member class cannot be instantiated without the required dependencies (an IMemberRepository) I am not sure how to do this in my partial. I know that Ninject can supply a the repository to my Controller class' constructor, but I do not knowhow to do this in a partial.

Answer 1

I was in this same predicament last week, as i have a partial that provides a list of 'top locations' to various views.

Ensure that the controller is injected with the necessary service or repository to provide the partial with the data it requires, then pass it to the view as a dynamic viewdata property (in mvc3)...

       public class LocationController : Controller
    {
        private readonly ILocationService _svc;

        public LocationController(LocationService svc)
        {
                _svc = svc;
        }

        public ActionResult Index()
        {
            //get data for 'top locations' partial
            var topOnes = svc.GetTopLocations(10);
            ViewData.TopLocations = topOnes;
            //mvc2 would be ViewData["TopLocations"] = topOnes;

            //get 'main' view data
            var location  = svc.GetDefaultLocation();
            return View(location);
        }

Or, more formally, include it in the view model that your controller returns.