Removing logic from partial views in ASP.NET MVC

Question

I am aware that views should not have code in them but in a project I am working on I have a lot of logic in the views.

My home page has

<% Html.RenderPartial("SearchResults"); %>

Now in the partial view I have an aweful lot of logic like this;

<div id="RestaurantsList">
<%if (Model.restaurantsList.Count() > 0)
{
    foreach (var item in Model.restaurantsList)
    { %>
        <% Html.RenderPartial("SearchResult", item); %>

    <%
    } %>
<%
}
else
{
    Html.RenderPartial("NoResults");

} %>

Now I could make the home controller return a different view based on the list being empty but I don't really want that as the Index view has a few things that I want displayed no matter if there are results or not.

The only other thing I can think of here is to encapsualte this in a helper method like Html.SearchResults. But then I would need the helper to call the renderPartial for each search result also. That doesn't seem like clean seperation of concerns.

I would still have to have the first if statement in the partial view though.

How would you best handle this?

Answer 1

My personal opinion is that this is okay. The logic that you've used is totally related to how the model needs to be displayed.

You just need to be aware and make sure that you're never mixing in business logic, data access logic or anything else that isn't strictly tied in to the display of the model.