model view controller - asp.net MVC DisplayTemplates and EditorTemplate naming convention

Question

I've got a couple of questions about the naming convention for the DisplayTemplates and EditorTemplates in MVC 2.

If for example I have a customer object with a child list of account how do I:

• Create a display template for the list of accounts, what is the file called?

• When I'm doing a foreach( var c in Model.Accounts ) how do I call a display temple while in the foreach loop? When I do Html.DisplayFor( x => x ) inside the foreach x is the model and not in this case c.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Yeah, this is one of my favorite features, but it's a bit confusing for some things.

So, creating a template for any class, the name is based on the type's Name property, so for example if you do a <%= model.GetType().Name %> in your view, you can see what I mean. As an example, if your list of accounts is an IList, then the call to .Name on the type would return List`1. That's a legal file name, so if you put List`1.ascx in your DisplayTemplates folder, it'll find it and use it. from what I can tell, it won't traverse the class hierarchy, though, so for example if you put an IEnumerable`1.ascx file in there, it won't find it.

To display in a loop, you need to pass in the item variable into the lambda, so in your example:

<% foreach (var c in Accounts){ %>
      <li><%= Html.DisplayFor(x => c) %></li>
<%}%>

Hope that helps. Paul