Rendering custom sections of an ASP.NET MVC EditorFor - asp.net-mvc

Question

I am late in on a project where possibly the most important requirements have been ignored until the 11th hour.
The application allows suppliers to apply to become contractors for a company via a fairly in depth online application form.
The application takes the form of question sections that make up a left sidebar nav and each section has a number of questions.
The requirements that have been ignored up until now are that each applicant who fills out a form online has an application type, e.g. construction, catering etc. and the requirements state that the application is configurable so that only certain sections appear to a certain application type and certain questions within a section should be configurable to appear to a particular application type.
Configuring the sections is easy but configuring the questions is not so easy. At the moment everything is hardcoded into razor views and EditorFor templates. Basically there is one EditorFor per ViewModel which makes up a Section e.g.
#model Models.Enforcement
<div >
<form class="form-horizontal" method="post" action="#Url.Action(nameof(ApplicationController.Enforcements))"
#Html.EditorFor(x => x)
</div>
And the editor for will look something like this:
#model GSCM.Logic.Web.Models.Enforcement
#using System.Web.Mvc.Html
<div>
#Html.HiddenFor(x => x.Id)
<div class="form-group">
#Html.LabelFor(model => model.Name)
<div>
#Html.TextBoxFor(model => model.Name)
#Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.Name, "", new { #class = "text-danger" })
</div>
</div>
My solution to this problem is to first of all be able to add custom attributes to a ViewModel class that tag the property as a configurable Question, e.g.
public class Enforcement
{
[ApplicationQuestion DisplayOrder=1, Partial="DifferentNamedPartial"]
public string Name{get;set;}
}
I then have my own EditorFor that loops through all these tagged Properties:
using System.Web.Mvc.Html;
public static class HtmlHelperExtensions
{
public static MvcHtmlString QuestionSetEditorFor<TModel, TProperty>(this HtmlHelper<TModel> htmlHelper, VMBaseClass model)
{
//PSEUDO CODE
var sectionHtml;
ForEach(var taggedProperty in model)
{
var basedOnProperty = GetFilePathFromProperty(taggedProperty);
sectionHtml += System.Web.Mvc.Html.GetPartial(basedOnProperty)
}
return MvcHtmlString.Create(sectionHtml);
}
}
So basically, I would need to chop up the existing EditorFor ViewModel templates and have a partial for each section, property.
My questions are:
Is this a good idea or is there a better way. Time is a constraint (as always)?
Can I create the html string in the way I have outlined above with the pseduo code that loops rounds the properties and calls out to the partials?

Answer 1

Here you can proceed like
Suppose your partial pages which you want to call in main pages using loops are:
_form-one-partial.cshtml
_form-two-partial.cshtml
_form-three-partial.cshtml
_form-four-partial.cshtml
_form-five-partial.cshtml
One of those partial page content as:
#model PartialFieldViewModel
//---other fileds on the page
<input type="text"/>
//---other fileds on the page
To call the partial on the basis of the loop around the "partial" varible in the main page where partial will be called as:
#model PartialViewModel
foreach (var partial in Model.Parital)
{
#Html.Partial("_form-{0}-partial".FormatWith(partial.PartialType.ToString().ToLower()), partial)
}
Partial view modal class as
public class PartialViewModel
{
//Other properties
public List<PartialFieldViewModel> Partial { get; set; }
}
public class PartialFieldViewModel
{
//Other properties
public Constants.PartialType PartialType{ get; set; }
}