Is having many render partial functions bad?

Question

I am trying to design my render partial. within one render partial i have 30 other render partial functions. I am rendering one item at a time. for example, I am going to put these items in their separate renderpartial function:

1. time
2. username
3. title
4. avatar
5. tags
6. score
7. user information -- each element has its separate render partial
8. and so on

so i am going to organize the render partial functions because there is going to be so many that is going to be on one page. Is this bad practice?

Answer 1

Very possibly. If you can, look for things they all have in common and try to create a generic function.

Answer 2

I think it depends: How many lines are in your partial view? There's no point to refactoring a one-line partial view, which is what it sounds like you're doing. If I misunderstand, then it would be helpful if you could post some sample code.

I can't picture why you would want to encapsulate a single line without seeing the line you want to put in a partial view. I'd be careful of premature optimization here. e.g. You probably want something like 3 10-line partial views instead of 30 1-liners.

As far as performance goes, I doubt you'd see a serious performance hit unless you're deploying on a particularly ancient server or getting very high traffic. So yes, it will definitely be slower than putting everything in a single view because you're calling a subroutine, but I don't think it'll make a real difference to your users.

Answer 3

Instead of partial views I tend to favour HTML helpers. eg:

public static string SidebarBoxEnd(this HtmlHelper helper) { return ""; }

If you're not already familiar and comfortable with the concept there's a good article here: http://stephenwalther.com/blog/archive/2009/03/03/chapter-6-understanding-html-helpers.aspx

I prefer that method because I also tend to use a lot of graphically complex layouts, and HTML Helpers seem to give the cleanest (thus most easily maintainable) view code. eg:

<%= Html.SidebarBoxBegin("Mailing List") %> <% Html.BeginForm("Subscribe","MailingList",FormMethod.Post); %> <%= Html.Button("Join Mailing List","submit","joinmailinglist") %> <% Html.EndForm(); %> <%= Html.SidebarBoxEnd() %>

as opposed to having several times as much code in div and class tags alone.