ASP.NET 4 24-Hour Trainer

Chapter 21B. Display Templates in MVC

Display templates are templated helpers that enable you to build a user interface based on your data model. In this lesson I show you how to use display templates to display the data in your model.

Here are the three helper methods in the DisplayExtensions class:

• Display() — This helper returns HTML markup for a particular property in the model where the property is identified via a string expression.

• DisplayFor() — This helper also returns HTML markup for a particular property in the model. However, with this helper, the property is identified via a strongly-typed expression.

• DisplayForModel() — This helper returns HTML markup for all of the simple properties in the model.

  Note

  The expression DisplayFor(model => model) is equivalent to DisplayForModel().

THE DISPLAYFORMODEL HELPER

Figure 21B-1 shows the Entity Data Model (EDM) that I use in this lesson.

Figure 21B.1. FIGURE 21B-1

This is the Details action method:

//
// GET: /Task/Details/5

public ActionResult Details(int id = 1)
{
    var task = (from t in _entity.Tasks
                where t.Id == id
                select t).FirstOrDefault();

    return View(task);
}

In the preceding action method I have set the default value of the id parameter to 1. This is the View that uses the DisplayForModel helper:

<%@ Page Title="" Language="C#" MasterPageFile="~/Views/Shared/Site.Master" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage<Lesson21b.Models.Task>" %> ...