ASP NET MVC What is the purpose of section

Question

For an ASP NET MVC application  I saw this blog article  The author ScottGu adds  section to the Index cshtml    I have a couple of questions  referring to the article above     Is Index cshtml a shared View   The example code uses  section code in a particular view  Why    Can someone please explain why and when I would use  section in a View

User · Answer

A good example is Javascript  You want this to be at the bottom of the page that is rendered in the browser because this is best practice   How would you do this from a View based on a Layout Masterpage where you can only access the middle of the page   You do this by declaring a Scripts section at the bottom of the Layout page  Then you can add content  in this case Javascript includes  I hope    from your View page to the bottom of your layout page

User · Answer

section is for defining a content are override from a shared view  Basically  it is a way for you to adjust your shared view  similar to a Master Page in Web Forms    You might find Scott Gu s write up on this very interesting   Edit  Based on additional question clarification  The  RenderSection syntax goes into the Shared View  such as    lt div id  sidebar  gt       RenderSection  Sidebar   required  false   lt  div gt    This would then be placed in your view with  Section syntax    section Sidebar       lt  -- Content Here -- gt      In MVC3  you can either define the Layout file to be used for the view directly or you can have a default view for all views   Common view settings can be set in  ViewStart cshtml which defines the default layout view similar to this          Layout      Views Shared  Layout cshtml       You can also set the Shared View to use directly in the file  such as index cshtml directly as shown in this snippet          ViewBag Title    Corporate Homepage       ViewBag BodyID    page-home       Layout      Views Shared  Layout2 cshtml       There are a variety of ways you can adjust this setting with a few more mentioned in this SO answer

User · Answer

You want to use sections when you want a bit of code content to render in a placeholder that has been defined in a layout page   In the specific example you linked  he has defined the RenderSection in the  Layout cshtml  Any view that uses that layout can define an  section of the same name as defined in Layout  and it will replace the RenderSection call in the layout   Perhaps you re wondering how we know Index cshtml uses that layout  This is due to a bit of MVC Razor convention  If you look at the dialog where he is adding the view  the box  Use layout or master page  is checked  and just below that it says  Leave empty if it is set in a Razor  viewstart file   It isn t shown  but inside that  ViewStart cshtml file is code like          Layout      Views Shared  Layout cshtml       The way viewstarts work is that any cshtml file within the same directory or child directories will run the ViewStart before it runs itself   Which is what tells us that Index cshtml uses Shared  Layout cshtml

User · Answer

It lets you define a  Section of code in your template that you can then include in other files  For example  a sidebar defined in the template  could be referenced in another included view     This could be used to render a  Section defined as  Section SideBar        RenderSection  SideBar   required  false     Hope this helps

[asp.net-mvc] ASP.NET MVC: What is the purpose of @section?

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