Andy Butland

One of the main pluses of working with the ASP.Net MVC framework is of course the separation of concerns it promotes with the split between the controller and the view in the UI. This is not only apparent in the standard method of having the controller obtain the data required for display, and passing this to a view for display as XHTML. The same clear separation of purpose can be made use of when the output of the view is other formats too. In a recent project I've had need to represent a calendar of events - a simple side bar to the website that displays a calendar view with days that have events associated with them highlighted. Clicking on the day displays the list of events below. In implementing this feature I made use of the controller and view pattern in three distinct ways. Having a controller render an XHTML page view Having a controller render JSON data for use from an AJAX request . Having a controller render a partial view to support an AJAX page update . Applicat