You can pass parameters in your Html.Action, so perhaps you could pass in the instance number of the gallery on the page.  So if you have two you could call them like this:

@Html.Action("RenderControl", "ImageGallerySurface", new { number = 1 })
@Html.Action("RenderControl", "ImageGallerySurface", new { number = 2}) 

You can pick up that number from your controller action method by defining it as a parameter.

public ActionResult RenderControl(int number = 1)

From that you could pass that number into your generated HTML in the partial view, perhaps as an id attribute like id="gallery-1" on your outer element for the gallery and in some generated javascript something like this:

<div id="gallery-1"></div>
<script>
initGallery("gallery-1");
</script> 

Hope that helps.

Andy

Hi Andy,

That's a really interesting idea, I was attempting to pass an ID from my model but this sounds like it will work. Once more thing, can you explain exactly how I can pass the number into the partial view? I can grab variables from my model using @(Html.Raw(Model.ID)) for a variable in my model called ID. However since the number is in the Controller how do I pass that into the partial view?

Thanks again,

Damien

I've figured it out, I was being a bit stupid! For anyone who would like to know, you simply create a constructor for your ViewModel that takes in the number (or in my case ID) as a parameter. e.g.

public class ImageGalleryViewModel
{
    public int ID { get; private set; }

    public ImageGalleryViewModel(int ID)
    {
        this.ID = ID;
    }
}

which can then be called from your controller like so:

public class ImageGallerySurfaceController : SurfaceController
{
    /// <summary>
    /// Renders the Contact Form
    /// @Html.Action("RenderControl","ImageGallerySurface");
    /// </summary>
    /// <returns></returns>
    public ActionResult RenderControl(int ID)
    {
        //Return a partial view ImageGallery.cshtml in /views/ImageGallerySurface/ImageGallery.cshtml
        //With an empty/new ContactFormViewModel
        return PartialView("ImageGallery", new ImageGalleryViewModel(ID));
    }

}

Yes, or, without the constructor, you can instantiate your view model like this:

returnPartialView("ImageGallery",newImageGalleryViewModel { ID = ID }));

Andy

Of course, using the C# feature to directly initialise the properties. I think my main stumbling block making the transition from WebForms to MVC is that MVC is actually a lot simpler which is throwing me a bit!

Thanks again.

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