asp.net MVC 4 - Htmlhelper extensions

Question

I am creating a custom HtmlHelper extension for Html.RenderAction. My Parent view will contain many different partial views which will be rendered byt calling Html.Renderaction. But the the admin can sort off switch of a partial view for a role or he can completely deactivate the action for entire application So i am planning to have an extension method for Html.RenderAction which will in turn check for the role and see if the role has access to a particular action. This role to action mapping is dine in xml and I am planning to load this xml as in memory data structure only once. And have the html helper extension look into that data structure. Is that a good way to go? Any better ways?

 @section column2 {
        @{Html.RenderActionIfIfAllowed("DashboardItem_Users", "DashBoard",User);}
        }

        @section column3 {
        @{Html.RenderActionIfIfAllowed("DashboardItem_Orders", "DashBoard", User);}
        }

I have to render the above partialviews. So i have created a html helper extension called Html.RenderActionIfIfAllowed.

public static class HtmlHelperExtensions 
{
   public static void RenderActionIfIfAllowed<TModel>(this HtmlHelper<TModel> htmlHelper, string actionName, string controllerName, IPrincipal user)
    {
       //We can use the layour manager class to check if a particular role has access to an action and also if the action is active.
       //Hard coding here just for demo purpose
        if (user.IsInRole("Admin") && actionName != "DashboardItem_Users")
        {
            System.Web.Mvc.Html.ChildActionExtensions.RenderAction(htmlHelper, actionName, controllerName);
        }
        else if (user.Identity.IsAuthenticated && !user.IsInRole("Admin"))
        {
            System.Web.Mvc.Html.ChildActionExtensions.RenderAction(htmlHelper, actionName, controllerName);
        }
    }

}

The reason for doing that way is because we would like to dynamically show or not show a aprtial view to user based on whether the view is active or not. We will read an xml file that will say whether the view is active not for a user and render it accordingly

Hello Hari, I can't understand the question correctly. Can you try to explain yourself better? perhaps with code examples of what you're trying to accomplish? — amhed
The only thing wrong here is that you have hard-coded checks for things like the "DashboardItems_Users" actionName. The purpose of abstracting a method like this is to write less code on the View which improves readability. If you can find a way for the checks to be generic (like reading from a role list in XML, or from permissions specified on a Database Table) then yeah, I think this is good :) — amhed

Murali Murugesan Murali Murugesan · Accepted Answer · 2013-02-26T05:29:12

I used to create ViewModel for this and set bool properties

public class DashBoardViewModel{

public DashBoard dashBoard{get;set;}

bool showItemDashBoard{get;set;}

bool showOrderDashBoard{get;set;}

}

In Controller I validate user role and set those boolean properties.

In View

if(Model.showItemDashBoard){
  @Html.RenderAction("Action","Controller")
}

asp.net MVC 4 - Htmlhelper extensions

1 Answers