MVC 4 Razor, Posting form with partial views

Question

I am new to MVC 4 and razor. I have a view which contains multiple partial views. Due to the functionality of the partial views I am planning to reuse these in other views also.

My model is a collection of complex objects e.g:

    public class EmployeeInfo
    {
        public EmployeeContactInfo contactInfo { get; set; }
        public List<TelephoneInfo> phoneDetails { get; set; }
        public AddressDetails addressDetails { get; set; }
    }

The model of my main view is EmployeeInfo and other partial views have models as TelephoneInfo, EmployeeContactInfo and AddressDetails respectively.

I tried using RenderPartial, RenderAction and Partial to load my partial views e.g:

    @using (Html.BeginForm())
    {
    @Html.Partial("ContactInfo",Model.contactInfo)
    }

When the main form is submitted the main model doesnt have the updated values of the partial views.

I searched for this and found below 2 proposed solutions:

1. Use EditorFor - It works and the model gets updated but I have collection of not only textbox but other controls which have some internal operations (like searching addresses) too and I also need to reuse the same partial view in other places (like a user control in classic ASP.NET)

2. Use RenderAction instead of RenderPartial - It didn't work for me.

Please let me know if I am going wrong or understood anything incorrectly.

Answer 1

Another choice is to create an editor template. For example, in your main view:

@using (Html.BeginForm())
{
    @(Html.EditorFor(m => m.ContactInfo))
}

Now, in your Views/Shared folder (or the Views/ControllerName folder eg Views/Home), create a new folder named "EditorTemplates". In that new folder create a cshtml view file named EmployeeContactInfo.cshtml (tip, the name of the cshtml should be the data type name e.g. string, bool or in this case your customer contact info type). In that view file, put something like:

@model EmployeeContactInfo

@Html.LabelFor(m => m.Email)
@Html.TextBoxFor(m => m.Email)

When you post back to the controller, the values will be included as part of the returned model for you.