Is making a BaseViewData class a property of a BaseController class a bad idea?

Question

Every controller class in my project derive from a base controller class, aptly named BaseController.

All view data is contained in a class named BaseViewData (which in the future could become the base controller for more specific view data classes).

I made a BaseViewData property on the BaseController since every controller requires access to the data inside the strongly-typed base view data (and the BaseController does some work to pre-populate some of the BaseViewData properties).

I did this because:

1. If I ever changed a property, I would get compile time error checking to resolve broken code more quickly.

2. Practicing DRY, I've managed to consolidate ALOT of code that was previously scattered throughout each controller.

However, this is the first time I've attempted to do this. So I could be overlooking a problem preparing to rear its ugly head. So:

Is making a BaseViewData class a property of a BaseController class a bad idea? If so, why?

Update 1:

My BaseController looks something like (there's more, but this should get the point across):

public class BaseController
{
  public string Language {get; set;}
  public string Locale {get; set;}
  public BaseViewData Data {get; set;}

  protected override void OnActionExecuting(ActionExecutingContext filterContext)
  {
    var l = (RouteData.Values["language"] != null) ? RouteData.Values["language"].ToString() : "en";
    if (l.ToLower().Contains("en"))
    {
      l = "en";
    }
    else
     l = "ja";

    Data.Language = l;
  }
}

My BaseViewData looks like this (again, there is more...):

public class BaseViewData
{
  public string Language {get;set;}
  public string Locale {get;set;}
  public bool IsOwner {get;set;}
  public string Menu1 {get;set;}
  public string Menu2 {get;set;}
  public string Menu3 {get;set;}

  public IPagedList<TYPE> ListOfTYPE {get;set;}
  etc...
}

Answer 1

For the only site I ever worked on in ASP.NET MVC, that's exactly what we did. The nice thing about this also was that we were able to hold values in the BaseViewData class that were needed in the Master Page. Because every View had an instance of some derived BaseViewData, we could safely use the data in the BaseViewData in the Master Page.

Answer 2

The menu component of your idea may not be necessary, with the ASP.NET MVC 2 Beta you can now use Http.RenderAction to call a controller action directly from a view (such as a BuildMenu action that retrieves the menu items from the repository and returns a partialview.

See Haacked more info...

Additionally, for the simpler content such as the language / locale, this may not be necessary if you use an ASP.NET Profile Provider (accessible via both controller & view).

Answer 3

IMHO, you are creating a monster.

As your app grows more and more features and global screens are going to be baked into that base view model. It inevitable will be a god code-behind class like .aspx.cs files MVC tries to avoid.

Its better to use things like MVC2's RenderAction or the SubController stuff from MVC Contrib even if it means breaking the MVC pattern a little bit.

Look at a site like CNN or even Stackoverflow.com, you'll have a dozen methods in there before you know it.