title: How to build a multi-view portal application in ASP.NET MVC
body: <p>I was just watching Scott Hanselman's presentation on ASP.NET MVC in San Francisco. After thinking about it for a while, I was stumped as to how to best approach building an ASP.NET MVC-based site that has a [portal|modular|multi-view] structure (pick your favorite definition).</p>
  
  <p>To give you an idea of what I'm after, my company builds a lot of portal-style applications for out clients that incorporate a mapping module that can respond to it's own query strings and routes, tax parcel information module that similarly has its own view(s), document retrieval view that displays single and multiple documents...you get the idea. The critical part is that each module is truly standalone. If a user searches for a tax record by name they might see 10 results ("JOHN DOE" owns a few properties). Each result has a "Map it" link because the website application framework knows that there is a map module available. The "Map it" link sends the right request like <a href="http://myapp.com/taxparcel/map/123443" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://myapp.com/taxparcel/map/123443</a>. The map module controller responds to the external request by zooming to the map and highlighting the tax parcel.</p>
  
  <p>The key to this whole flow is that <em>both</em> the tax and mapping modules are on the same web page.</p>
  
  <p>So how does that fit in to the ASP.NET MVC box? Partials? Sub views? Multiple views for a single controller? If I'm just missing the obvious part of the documentation then feel free to lambast me publicly and include the link. Otherwise I'm wide open to suggestions.</p>