MVC nested content

So.. I am getting there with the using the @Html.Action("GetSlides", "Slide") to get the partial view... Now I need to figure out how to pass some id or something into the action so that I only get slides for the current story.

You say you're building a one page site, so that could change a lot about how your views are arranged and served to the user, but in general, you'd have a Story controller for each story where you want to display the slides. In that controller, get the Slide children of the current TreeNode, then feed those into a ViewModel for the Story view.

var slideNodes = DocumentHelper.GetDocuments<CMS.DocumentEngine.Types.MyNamespace.Slide>().Path(currentNode.NodeAliasPath, PathTypeEnum.Children).OrderBy("NodeLevel ASC, NodeOrder ASC");

You could feed them directly into the ViewModel for the Story controller from there, or best practice would be to create another ViewModel for the individual slides.

storyViewModel.slides = slideNodes.Select(n => new MySlideViewModel() { Title = n.Title, Image = n.Image });

Also best practice would be to use the DocumentQueryService rather than the DocumentHelper directly, as well as the CacheService to lighten the load for future requests. Hope that points you in the right direction!

Per your comment, I'd prefer to use Html.RenderPartial() in the parent view, where I can pass the list of slides directly to it; otherwise, you'll need to add the story ID as a parameter to the ActionMethod and pass it as a route value in the Action/RenderAction call.

public ActionResult GetSlides(int storyID)

And in your view...

Html.Action("GetSlides", "Slide", new { nodeID = Model.NodeID })

I'd personally prefer to be more specific with my action method names. For instance, if my GetSlides action method is on my Slides controller, I'd name it GetSlidesByStory(int storyID), because you may need methods to get slides by other criteria, like GetSlidesByCategory(). Or, I would consider making this an action method on my Story controller, like GetStorySlides(int slideID).

Thanks for you help. I got it working the way I wanted. Not sure if it is the most elegant, but I have this on my view @Html.Action("GetSlides", "Slide", new { id = story.NodeID }) and then my ActionResult looks like this

public ActionResult GetSlides(int id)
    {

        var slides = StorySlideProvider.GetStorySlides()
            .Columns("StorySlideID", "Title", "Summary", "Image", "Description", "Quote", "NodeParentID")     
            .WhereEquals("NodeParentID", id)
            .OrderBy("NodeOrder");

        var model = slides.Select(item => new SlideViewModel()
        {
            StorySlideID = item.StorySlideID,
            Title = item.Title,
            Summary = item.Summary,
            Image = item.Image,
            Description = item.Description,
            NodeParentID = item.NodeParentID

        }); ;


        return PartialView("_slides", model);
    }

Nice job, looks good! My only suggestion for elegance is still to be more specific with the action method name, especially because it's on the Slide controller. I'd personally move it to the Story controller as GetStorySlides(), or rename it to GetSlidesByStory() on the Slide controller.