Tips and Tricks

Cool things you can do with models

It's possible with Razor to define functions for rendering HTML. We can leverage our strongly typed models when doing this, and even provide overloads for different types of models. That will automatically be called for different models using dynamic

@functions
{
  // Declare how to render a news item
  void RenderContent(NewsItem item)
  {
    <div>News! @item.Title</div>
  }

  // Declare how to render a product
  void RenderContent(Product item)
  {
    <div>Product! @product.Name cheap at @product.Price</div>
  }
}

@{
  RenderContent((dynamic) Model);
}

It's not recommended to create a template and doing all the rendering via razor function, but it can be nifty for rendering search results.

A thing that's important to note here is that RenderContent is called from a codeblock, and not as @RenderContent((dynamic) Model); the reason for this is that if you try to use the latter, razor will expect for the function to return something for it to render.

By casting the strongly typed to a dynamic when calling the RenderContent method, you tell C# to do late runtime binding. You also tell it to pick the proper RenderContent implementation depending on the actual Common Language Runtime (CLR) type of the content object. Using dynamic here is OK and will not pollute the rest of the code.