Suggestions on how to accomplish a specific functionality in MVC3

Question

I have a MVC3 application, based on default layout from VS 2010, which I changed to looklike in image below

The submenu area is defined in _layout.cshtml as

    <div id="sidebar">
    <h3>Entities</h3>
    <p></p>
        <ul>
            @Html.Partial("_EntitiesMenu")
        </ul>        
    </div>
    <section id="main">
        @RenderBody()
    </section>

and the _EntitiesMenu contains entries as below

<li>@Html.ActionLink("Addresses", "Index", "Address")</li>      
<li>@Html.ActionLink("Applications", "Index", "Application")</li>       

I have a single MapRoute defined as

routes.MapRoute("Default", // Route name
    "{controller}/{action}/{id}", // URL with parameters
     { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional });

All my entity controllers started from menu are defined standard in Controllers and views in Views.

What I need is to change the app to use a layout as below

When users click Entities app should navigate to myapp/entities/ or myapp/entities/index and it should open a view in main work area that will look like below

Then when users click on right submenus, the url should look like myapp/entities/entity1/index, myapp/entities/entity1/edit/1, etc (exactly like now but "under" entities page.
I defined the Entities controller like

public class EntitiesController : Controller
{
    public ActionResult Index()
    { return View();}
}

And it's view looks like

<div id="workarea">
    // here should became new Body region, to load all views called from the other controllers
    // something like @RenderBody(), but this don't works
</div>
<div id="sidebar">
<h3>Entities</h3>
<ul>
    @Html.Partial("_EntitiesMenu")
</ul>        
</div>

I don't want to have to make changes to entities controllers or views (or minimal changes if absolutely necessary, because there are lot of them). Can I somehow assign that area as main Body, while under scope of entities? And if user click on top Home / About, it will "unload" the EntitiesView from _layout.cshtml?

Not sure if my question is very clear, but I hope someone will understand what I'm after.

Thank you

Answer 1

I managed (sort of) to accomplish something close to what I need using following approach:

1. Changed the _layout as below

   <section id="main">
       <div>
           @RenderBody()
       </div>
       <div>
           @RenderSection("EntityCRUD", false)
       </div>
   </section>
   

2. Created the view for Entities as:

   @Html.Partial("_PanelEntitiesMenu")

3. Defined _PanelEntitiesMenu as

   <div id="sidebar">
   <h3>Entities</h3>
   <p></p>
       <ul>
       @Html.Partial("_EntitiesMenu")
       </ul>        
   </div> 
   

4. Enclosing the entities views (Index, Edit / Delete / Details / Create) in

   @section EntityCRUD
   {
   @Html.Partial("_PanelEntitiesMenu")
   //... original view code
   }
   

5. Changed all involved views to have the view "body" included in section, and at the beginning of the section I load the panel menu as partial view

   @section EntityCRUD
   {
       @Html.Partial("_PanelEntitiesMenu")
       ....
   }
   

Not exactly what I wanted, but that's the best I found so far.

Answer 2

Are you talking about @RenderSection http://blogs.msdn.com/b/marcinon/archive/2010/12/08/optional-razor-sections-with-default-content.aspx