access database info in a partial view, .ascx that

Hi i'm having problems with this. I am developing an asp.net mvc 2 application. I have a partial view menu.ascx defined. this gets included on all the pages of my site in the Site.Master masterpage. Now the thing is I want my menu to change according to the type of user. Here's what I did at first:

<%@ Control Language="C#" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewUserControl<dynamic>" %>
<li><%: Html.ActionLink("Home", "Index", "Home")%></li>
<% 
    ExtendedMemberShip.MemberShipUser user = ExtendedMemberShip.MemberShip.GetUser(HttpContext.Current.User.Identity.Name);
    string course = "Course/Index/";
    if(user != null) course += user.UserName;
%>
<% 
     if(user!=null && user.Type == "stud") { 
%>
         <li><%: Html.ActionLink("Courses", "Index", course)%></li>
<% 
      }
%>
<li><%: Html.ActionLink("Votes", "About", "Home")%></li>
<li><%: Html.ActionLink("Comments", "About", "Home")%></li>
<li><%: Html.ActionLink("Exam archives", "About", "Home")%></li>

The problem with this is that I shouldn't be doing this in the view ! But since this is the MasterPage no controller actually calls it so I don't know where to put the info in the ViewData dictionnary or ViewModel to pass it to this masterpage... any ideas?

You can still do this in your controller. Populate your the relevant data into the ViewData dictionary:

public ActionResult Any()
{
    LoadUserType();
    return View();
}

private void LoadUserType()
{
    ExtendedMemberShip.MemberShipUser user = 
        ExtendedMemberShip.MemberShip.GetUser(HttpContext.Current.User.Identity.Name);
    ViewData["UserType"] = user.Type;
}

In your master page use:

<% Html.RenderPartial("Menu", ViewData["UserType"]) %>

You could avoid having to call LoadUserType() or whatever by creating a Custom Attribute that did that for you, or putting it in a base class that all of your controllers extended.

Alternatively, you could just populate the menu items as part of the Model and pass the Model to the PartialView.