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I want to include a drop down list of years across all the pages in my website. I assumed a good place to put this logic was in the layout page (_layout.cshtml). If a user changes the year I want to change my year session (ModelBinder) to change as well. This was so easy to do with ASP.NET web forms, but seems near impossible to do in MVC. I tried a partial view with no luck. Anybody have any ideas?

Darin Dimitrov
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Sam Stange
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1 Answers1

88

As usual you could start by defining a view model:

public class YearsViewModel
{
    public string Year { get; set; }
    public IEnumerable<SelectListItem> Years
    {
        get
        {
            return new SelectList(
                Enumerable.Range(1900, 112)
                .OrderByDescending(year => year)
                .Select(year => new SelectListItem
                {
                    Value = year.ToString(),
                    Text = year.ToString()
                }
            ), "Value", "Text");
        }
    }
}

Then a controller:

public class YearsController : Controller
{
    public ActionResult Index()
    {
        return View(new YearsViewModel());
    }

    [HttpPost]
    public ActionResult Index(int year)
    {
        // TODO: do something with the selected year
        return new EmptyResult();
    }
}

and a corresponding view for the index action:

@model SomeAppName.Models.YearsViewModel
@{
    Layout = null;
}
@Html.DropDownListFor(x => x.Year, Model.Years)

And finally inside your _Layout.cshtml you could use this controller:

<div id="selectyear">@Html.Action("index", "years")</div>

and attach a corresponding script which would send an AJAX request when the value changes:

$(function () {
    $('#selectyear select').change(function () {
        $.post('@Url.Action("index", "years")', { year: $(this).val() }, function (result) {

        });
    });
});
Darin Dimitrov
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  • Awesome. Adapted it for a country selector with no trouble at all. Thanks loads. – Roberto Bonini May 07 '11 at 18:20
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    This was very helpful in providing a clear implementation of ASP.NET MVC. There's a lot more to learn here than just how to put a drop down on the page, Thank you. – hanzolo Apr 21 '12 at 06:53
  • @DarinDimitrov Hi. thanks that great work. but one doubt how i will do it using ViewBag. I need to bind dropdown in layout page using viewbag r session. because if i specified "@model SomeAppName.Models.YearsViewModel" in my layout page means i cannot able to pass any model from my content page to view like return view("home",Detail) because here the layout except yearviewmodel. so it will throw error. – Ryder Jun 24 '14 at 05:56