When a controller renders a view based on a model you can get the properties from the ViewData collection using the indexer (ie. ViewData["Property"]). However, I have a shared user control that I tried to call using the following:
return View("Message", new { DisplayMessage = "This is a test" });
and on my Message control I had this:
<%= ViewData["DisplayMessage"] %>
I would think this would render the DisplayMessage correctly, however, null is being returned. After a heavy dose of tinkering around, I finally created a "MessageData" class in order to strongly type my user control:
public class MessageControl : ViewUserControl<MessageData>
and now this call works:
return View("Message", new MessageData() { DisplayMessage = "This is a test" });
and can be displayed like this:
<%= ViewData.Model.DisplayMessage %>
Why wouldn't the DisplayMessage property be added to the ViewData (ie. ViewData["DisplayMessage"]) collection without strong typing the user control? Is this by design? Wouldn't it make sense that ViewData would contain a key for "DisplayMessage"?