ASP.NET MVC 3 – Partial vs Display Template vs Editor Template

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So, the title should speak for itself.

To create re-usable components in ASP.NET MVC, we have 3 options (could be others i haven’t mentioned):

Partial View:

@Html.Partial(Model.Foo, "SomePartial")

Custom Editor Template:

@Html.EditorFor(model => model.Foo)

Custom Display Template:

@Html.DisplayFor(model => model.Foo)

In terms of the actual View/HTML, all three implementations are identical:

@model WebApplications.Models.FooObject

<!-- Bunch of HTML -->

So, my question is – when/how do you decide which one of the three to use?

What i’m really looking for is a list of questions to ask yourself before creating one, for which the answers can be used to decide on which template to use.

Here’s the 2 things i have found better with EditorFor/DisplayFor:

  1. They respect model hierarchies when rendering HTML helpers (e.g if you have a “Bar” object on your “Foo” model, the HTML elements for “Bar” will be rendered with “Foo.Bar.ElementName”, whilst a partial will have “ElementName”).

  2. More robust, e.g if you had a List<T> of something in your ViewModel, you could use @Html.DisplayFor(model => model.CollectionOfFoo), and MVC is smart enough to see it’s a collection and render out the single display for each item (as opposed to a Partial, which would require an explicit for loop).

I’ve also heard DisplayFor renders a “read-only” template, but i don’t understand that – couldn’t i throw a form on there?

Can someone tell me some other reasons? Is there a list/article somewhere comparing the three?

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