ASP.Net MVC Dashboard View. Where to perform aggregations

Question

I have read a few other stackoverflow posts regarding dashboard setup in a view, but I am still struggling a bit. I have one master query that is returning a detailed view of my data, since I only want to hit the database once. So I have a Controller Action called GetEmployeeInfo() that returns a IEnumerable<EmployeeBase> model class. I want to be able to take this class and break it apart into different divs in a view. For example, I would have three divs on top of the View aggregating row count by employee category and 2 divs on the botton that shows the detailed table. Can this be accomplished strictly through one view by setting up conditional/aggregate statements all over or do I use partial views or something else. Or is using one controller action a problem?

Thank you.

Answer 1

I used the answer from Pat Burke (see comments under my question. I posted it below as well). I created one base class and one partial view for my employee categories that has all the properties I needed. I did the same for my detail portion. Then I created the DashboardViewModel which had 3 IEnumerable<EmployeeCategoryBase> properties as well as 2 IEnumerable<EmployeeDetailInfo> properties. Then I created a strongly typed DashboardViewModel view with 5 divs that used @{Html.RenderPartial(ViewName,model.property);}

Another alternative is to have your Dashboard view strongly typed to a View Model like "DashboardViewModel" which is composed of different collections which correspond to the data needed for each sub-part. This would also put the aggregation logic to the server-side rather than on the client in JS. You could even have partial views included, each of which corresponds to a sub-part and a collection of data in your View Model. It's good practice to have your view model directly correlate to the data needed by your view