I'm trying to pass ViewData to my asp.net mvc masterpage for an mvc usercontrol that I keep on a masterpage. For example, I created a dropdownlist of names as an mvc usercontrol and I put that in my masterpage.
The problem I am running into is passing the ViewData to the masterpage. I found this article from Microsoft which has a decent solution but I was wondering if there are other "better" solutions out there. The thing I don't like about the solution in the link is that I have to change every controller to inherit from a new controller class.
http://www.asp.net/learn/MVC/tutorial-13-cs.aspx
Edit: The problem I am looking at is the fact that if I place a user control in my masterpage that relies on ViewData, I have to REPEATEDLY include that ViewData for every single page that uses said masterpage. It's possible the solution in the link above is the best solution but I was hoping there were other alternatives.
For what it's worth, I am using the method from that tutorial in a current project and it works very well.
What you can also do, if it is data that is somewhat static (like a menu that doesn't change much), is to put the object on the cache so your database isn't called for every controller initialisation.