So I was playing around the other day with Sitecore MVC and some View Renderings. As I’m more familiar with Web Forms than MVC I started asking my self how I translate some thing I do in Web Forms to MVC like for example how would I go about hiding a view rendering. In Web Forms with Sub Layouts it’s easily done by changing visiblity like:
this.Visible = false;
So for example if the Item that the datasource would point to, didn’t have any published version in the current language, I could just hide it using that small piece of code.
Now how would I go about doing this with MVC. The only solution I found what to used jquery to hide the rendering which wasn’t good enough. So I started looking at the rules engine and conditional renderings and found that you can define global conditional rendering rules. However only with Web Forms and not MVC. According to documentation global conditional rendering rules does not work with MVC, no reason why, it just don’t… or does it?
Weeeeeell, regular conditional rendering works with MVC. So wouldn’t it be possible to extend this to include the global rules as well? After some fiddling with dotPeak on Sitecore assemblies it was quite easy to implement.
Looking at how it was done for Web Forms in Sitecore.Pipelines.InsertRenderings.Processors.EvaluateConditions which is run for every rendering when using Web Forms. And also investigate where and when Sitecore handled conditional renderings for MVC. It was quite straight forward to implement a processor processor that would evaluate the global conditional rendering rules for the MVC renderings.
Once I was done with the processor I implemented a condition that used the ConditionalRenderingsRuleContext and check if the datasource of the rendering had any versions published in the current language. Just to see of I could hide all renderings with a datasource pointing at items with no version. Guess what… worked like a charm.
You can find the source code here
Please do comment other ways to hide renderings in MVC 
