one page MVC project with 50 menu links

[mohammed]

I am designing a SAAS based application on .net MVC 2 platform using telrik mvc controls.

Left menu panel, header and footer are common for all pages. I want to avoid loading these items on every single page. IN a sense I want to use AJAX at application level by refreshing content area ONLY on every click of menu item.

My questions:
1)Will this be accomplished by having controls of all virtual web pages on one page and then control their hide and show behavior depending on menu click? Is there any other better way?

2) What happens when we launch the app? Will it try to load all controls to client in one shot and hide it in background? OR will it load controls of default page and then fetch whatever is requested via AJAX?

[Atanas Korchev]

Hello mohammed,

While such application design is possible with ASP.NET MVC I will not recommend it. It may get very complicated to load partial views with ajax and append them in the main page. Such an approach would also not be search engine friendly - crawlers will not be able to index the content. If I must implement it that way I would do this:

1. Have all specific page implemented as a partial view
2. When the user clicks a navigation item (menu item, treeview node etc) make an ajax request to an action method which renders the partial view.
3. Append the returned HTML in the main page.

You can check the client side checkboxes example which demonstrates partial view loading with jquery.

Regards,
Atanas Korchev
the Telerik team

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