Passing data to partial view that is used in many places can be done in many ways:
Create base model class for all your models. In base class define PartialModel property which will be holding model for partial view (there may be many of them if use have many partial views). Now you can populate the PartialModel property in controller action, but to make code more reusable you can create your own Action Filter which will insert the partial view data just after the action method is executed (but before the model is passed to the view)
public class PartialViewModelAttribute : ActionFilterAttribute
{
public override void OnActionExecuted(ActionExecutedContext filterContext)
{
BaseViewModel model;
if (filterContext.Controller.ViewData.Model == null)
{
model = new BaseViewModel();
filterContext.Controller.ViewData.Model = model;
}
else
{
model = filterContext.Controller.ViewData.Model as BaseViewModel;
}
model.PartialModel = new PartialModel(...) // Partial model initialization
base.OnActionExecuted(filterContext);
}
}
Then you can use it like:
[PartialViewModel]
public ActionResult Index()
{
//...
}
Another option: you can create BaseController class for all your controllers and create PartialModel on base controller initialization. Then PartialModel can be stored in ViewData[] dictionary. Because using ViewData dictionary in views is bad, create extension method on HtmlHelper like:
public static PartialModel GetPartialModel(this HtmlHelper helper)
{
return helper.viewContext.ViewData["PartialModel"] as PartialModel
}
So you could obtaint the model this way:
<% Html.RenderPartial("MyPartial", Html.GetPartialModel()); %>