MVC Model Property by string Name - asp.net-mvc

Question

A common way to fill a table is:
#For Each item In Model
Dim currentItem = item
#<tr>
<td>currentitem.Data1</td>
<td>currentitem.Data2</td>
<td>currentitem.Data3</td>
</tr>
Next
But for some reasons (to control the order of columns), I would like to refer to the fields by their string names, something like this:
#For Each item In Model
Dim currentItem = item
#<tr>
<td>currentitem("Data1").Value</td>
<td>currentitem("Data2").Value</td>
<td>currentitem("Data3").Value</td>
</tr>
Next
Is it somehow possible?

Answer 1

Ok - now that we have established that you need to change the order of your view model, let's do a little bit of work to your view model to make it easier to change the order. Given that we have to change the order of how we display things, we have to have a way to track what order to display them in. To change on the fly in the view without having different views with different orders (could get messy fast) - so let's just update our model a little bit.
Let assume this is your view model
public class OriginalViewModel{
public string Data1 {get;set;}
public string Data2 {get;set;}
public string Data3 {get;set;|
}
Let's create a new class called DataProperty. This will hold the data objects as well as allow us to set a display order that we can sort on later.
public class DataProperty{
public int DisplayOrder {get;set;}
public string Data {get;set;}
}
Now, let's update your view model to be a set of these DataProperties. We are using something we can enumerate and order by the display order.
public class UpdatedViewModel{
public IEnumerable<DataProperty> DataSet {get;set;}
}
Now, you can set the display order on each one of your property elements.
var listOfItems = new List<DataProperty>();
listOfItems.Add(new DataProperty{Data = "data1", DisplayOrder = 2});
listOfItems.Add(new DataProperty{Data = "data2", DisplayOrder = 3});
listOfItems.Add(new DataProperty{Data = "data3", DisplayOrder = 1});
var model = new UpdatedViewModel();
model.Data = listOfItems;
In your view, order by the display order property. Note we can now use Linq to order our data appropriately based on the requirements for this view.
#{foreach(var item in Model.OrderBy(x=>x.Data.DisplayOrder){
<tr>
<td>#item.Data</td>
<td>#item.Data</td>
<td>#item.Data</td>
</tr>
}}
which should render in HTML
<tr>
<td>data3</td>
<td>data1</td>
<td>data2</td>
</tr>

Answer 2

Thank you Tommy,
I tried to solve it in simple way and did this:
For example, I have a Viewdata that contains the order of the columns:
ViewData("columnsorder")="|3|1|2|"
and then, I just loop through ViewData and set the columns.
#For Each item In Model
Dim currentItem = item
#<tr>
#For i As Integer = 1 To ViewData("columnsorder").ToString.Split("|").Count - 2
Dim ind As Integer = ViewData("columnsorder").ToString.Split("|")(i)
Select Case ind
Case 1#<td>#currentItem.Data1</td>
Case 2#<td>#currentItem.Data2</td>
Case 3#<td>#currentItem.Data3</td>
End Select
Next
</tr>
Next