There is a discussion occurring on the ASP.NET forums about passing data to Master Pages using ASP.NET MVC. I couldn't figure out how to post code in the forums, so this post contains an example of the solution I am currently using.
I defined a "container" class that contains the data for the specific view and the data needed by the master page. It looks like this:
public class ViewDataContainer<T>
{
public ITopMenuData TopMenu { get; set; }
public ILeftMenuData LeftMenu { get; set; }
public T Data { get; set; }
}
As you can see, this class is generic on the type of view data that it contains.
Next, I created a custom Controller-derived class that looks like this:
public class ControllerBase<T> : Controller
{
protected override void RenderView(string viewName, string masterName, object viewData)
{
ViewDataContainer<T> container = new ViewDataContainer<T>
{
TopMenu = new TopMenuData(),
LeftMenu = new LeftMenuData(),
Data = (T)viewData
};
base.RenderView(viewName, masterName, container);
}
}
This class takes the view data that's passed in by the controller and wraps it up in an instance of ViewDataContainer<T> that is then passed along. As to where to get the TopMenuData and LeftMenuData, I'm still working on that :).
In this incarnation, views need to derive from ViewPage<ViewDataContainer<T>> (specifying T) and then access their view data via the ViewData.Data property. Today I was playing around with a ViewPage<T> derived class that would expose the typed view data directly. Maybe I'll post that soon as well.