How to structure views/controllers/actions(/areas?) in asp.net mvc app in this context?

Question

At top there is some most useful info about foo.

Between horizontal lines there is some immediate actions, if they are available, to perform on/with foo.

And below is thing that bothers me. There goes tabbed, detailed information about foo.
Those tabs can hold some actions too and can be quite sovereign.

So the question is - how to properly structure this thing (what should be controllers, actions, how do they talk to each other) in order to avoid unnecessary hussle?

I'm confused cause those tabs below are like a separate island.

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In model - there's that strange thing: 1 on 1 relation. It's like there's a Contest (Foo), and Participant. Tabs are detailed description of Participant.

Currently I've modeled them both as aggregate roots. But it might be a wrong choice.

So - if there are two roots, it seems natural if both of them got controllers and Contest isn't really responsible to hold all data.

It seems that sub actions would be the way to go, but I foresee some complexity. When tabs will hold some actions, they will need to know how to redirect back to Contest details and how to pass info how to render correct tab. This coupling I would like to avoid but it seems there's no way to do that.

Answer 1

I can think of a couple options for those tabs ... which one makes sense probably depends on what your Model looks like, how you retrieve data and, to some degree, what the rest of your app looks like.

Option 1. Partial Views with RenderPartial(). Each tab is a partial view that renders some portion of your Model. For example, you would have a FinancialInformation.aspx partial view that renders Model.FinancialInformation.

Option 2a. Sub Actions with RenderAction(). Similar to above except that each tab is responsible for pulling its own data by calling an action method either on the same controller or more likely another controller that specializes in that information.

Option 2b. Same as 2a except that the tabs are rendered on demand using AJAX.

I should point out that none of these options is mutually exclusive. You might use option 1 (RenderPartial()) for the first two tabs since that data is inherently part of your model. And you might use option 2 (RenderAction()) for the other two tabs because, for example, you might have a ChartController the specializes in rendering charts ...