Access Main View data from ajax partial view - asp.net-mvc-4

Question

Situation:
Let say we have a list of products and each with a bunch of orders. I have a my index view that has this list of products contained in the model. I iterate over the list and display a list of products on the page. I add an jquery click event for each project, the click event loads a partial view for each order beneith the product list.
Order partial view would look like this:
#model Order
<p>#Model.orderNum</p>
#Html.DropDownListFor(Order.CustomerName,CustomerNameList)
<input type="submit"/>
Index view would look like this:
#model List<Products>
#foreach(Product p in #Model)
{<button class="product-button">#p.productId</button>}
<div id="orderDiv"/>
then I would execute the following javascript for every order for the product:
$("#orderDiv").append($("<div></div>).load("MyController/Order/[order ID would go here]"));
This would load an order with a seperate partial view for each order id the product had.
Problem:
The simple solution would be to have the CustomerNameList in the Order Model. However, I don't want to load that data to the page so many times. Is there a way I can put it in the ViewBag or store it somewhere else so this list is available to the whole page?
Notes:
I don't want to use one partial view for all of the orders (ie. have the order view model be a list and iterate over it in the partial view) because I want to be able to submit each order individually (to save it)
I also might need to use this list of Customers on some other part of my page. I would like to keep it available. For example maybe I have a button that says new order and this uses ajax to load a parital view and that partial view also needs the customer list. I don't want to send that data to the page so manye times.
Can I do this?
Is this just a bad way to do this?

Answer 1

Not too sure why you would want to load a dropdown list of users, for already, existing orders. That means you are wanting the facility to change WHO made the order?
However, if you must, you can load your customer dropdown list as an empty dropdown with a class of customer, you can then make an internal call to get the json for customer, and then load up all your instances of class customer, with the data from your json call of customer data.
This would allow you to have 50 orders listed, with one single collection of customers data.
personally though, you should have relationships with your models using foreign keys, or using a viewmodel that would already add in your customers list, you would also only wish to show full order details to a user, if they clicked on the row to show full details.
Even if someone goes mental on the screen and clicks all 50 to look at, you should still be able to handle these request without much trouble, otherwise and likewise you wont be able to have 50 customers all looking at there baskets at the same time, or 50 customers all searching the products database at once!