MVC 3 Editor Template with Dynamic Drop Down

Question

How do I get the drop down to display as part of my editor template?

So I have a Users entity and a Roles entity. The Roles are passed to the view as a SelectList and User as, well, a User. The SelectList becomes a drop down with the correct ID selected and everything thanks to this sample.

I'm trying to get an all-in-one nicely bundled EditorTemplate for my entities using MVC 3 so that I can just call EditorForModel and get the fields laid out nicely with a drop down added whenever I have a foreign key for things like Roles, in this particular instance.

My EditorTemlates\User.cshtml (dynamically generating the layout based on ViewData):

<table style="width: 100%;">
@{
    int i = 0;  
    int numOfColumns = 3;

    foreach (var prop in ViewData.ModelMetadata.Properties
        .Where(pm => pm.ShowForDisplay && !ViewData.TemplateInfo.Visited(pm))) 
    { 
        if (prop.HideSurroundingHtml) 
        { 
            @Html.Display(prop.PropertyName) 
        }
        else 
        { 
            if (i % numOfColumns == 0)
            {

                @Html.Raw("<tr>");
            }

            <td class="editor-label">
                @Html.Label(prop.PropertyName)
            </td>
            <td class="editor-field">
                @Html.Editor(prop.PropertyName)
                <span class="error">@Html.ValidationMessage(prop.PropertyName,"*")</span>
            </td>

            if (i % numOfColumns == numOfColumns - 1)
            {
                @Html.Raw("</tr>");
            }
            i++;
        }
    }
}
</table>

On the View I'm then binding the SelectList seperately, and I want to do it as part of the template.

My Model:

public class SecurityEditModel
{
    [ScaffoldColumn(false)]
    public SelectList roleList { get; set; }

    public User currentUser { get; set; }
}

My Controller:

public ViewResult Edit(int id)
{
    User user = repository.Users.FirstOrDefault(c => c.ID == id);

    var viewModel = new SecurityEditModel
        {
            currentUser = user,
            roleList = new SelectList(repository.Roles.Where(r => r.Enabled == true).ToList(), "ID", "RoleName")
        };

    return View(viewModel);
}

My View:

@model Nina.WebUI.Models.SecurityEditModel

@{
    ViewBag.Title = "Edit";
    Layout = "~/Views/Shared/_Layout.cshtml";
}

<h2>Edit</h2>


@using(Html.BeginForm("Edit", "Security"))
{
    @Html.EditorFor(m => m.currentUser)
    <table style="width: 100%;">
        <tr>
            <td class="editor-label">
                User Role:
            </td>
            <td class="editor-field">
                <!-- I want to move this to the EditorTemplate -->
                @Html.DropDownListFor(model => model.currentUser.RoleID, Model.roleList)
            </td>
        </tr>
    </table>
    <div class="editor-row">
        <div class="editor-label">

        </div>
        <div class="editor-field">

        </div>
    </div>
    <div class="editor-row">&nbsp;</div>
    <div style="text-align: center;">
        <input type="submit" value="Save"/>&nbsp;&nbsp;
        <input type="button" value="Cancel" onclick="location.href='@Url.Action("List", "Clients")'"/>
    </div>

}       

Hopefully that's clear enough, let me know if you could use more clarification. Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Since you need access to the SelectList you can either create an editor template bound to SecurityEditModel or you can pass the SelectList in ViewData. Personally I would go with the strongly typed approach.