I have a controller which controls a view which is a criteria search page. The view has a search criteria section at the top and a grid section at the bottom which will display the results from the search.
I have two repositories in my controller, one for Common stuff like combobox values which is associated with Criteria section. The other repository is for the grid data.
I create a viewmodel with both repositories and pass it to my view (as my model) which makes my Model really huge. Is there any better way of doing this?
It is better to use Unit of Work and Repository
Related
I need to display/present two different models in a master-detail grid.
One model(collection) is bound to master grid.It has a link in one of the column and is enabled/disabled based on condition. Simple.
What I need to do is upon clicking the link I should be able to populate the detail grid by calling another controller- action. I need the row information,to pass the row details/ model data to the controller-action to fetch the model for detail grid.How do I do this through Javascript/jQuery.
The detail model is not a collection.
Any other approach to achieve this?
http://demos.telerik.com/aspnet-mvc/razor/grid/detailsajax gives a great example on how to do this with AJAX. I am assuming you are using the MVC Extensions by Telerik?
Im starting MVC & would like your advice about Repositories & View models, specifically combining a few sets of repository data into one VM.
If I have a web page with three distinct sections (columns) that require their own repositories (sorry for the basic nature of this):
UserInfoData - shown in Left col
DiaryData - shown in Middle col
CommentData - Shown in Right col
Im doing the following :-
public ActionResult Index(int id)
{
UserInfoData uid = repository.GetUserInfoData(id);
UserInfoDataVM UserViewModel = Mapper.Map<UserInfoData, UserInfoDataVM>(uid);
//RETRIEVE DiaryData & CommentData using same principle as above
return ??
}
How would I combine these three VM's into something I can return to the view - do I use another VM which accepts these three VM's?
Is there a best practice when dealing with smaller segments of a web page that have their own data?
In my opinion, it depends on your usage scenario.
You could create a View Model that contains the three sub view models, but you would need to ask yourself, am I going to use any of the three sub view models anywhere else? If not, then you could just use one large view model. Else, there is nothing wrong with the 'wrapper' view model that encapsulates smaller view models.
You could keep the three view models as you have defined above and you could use the Html.RenderAction syntax in your view to actually go and fetch each of the sub parts of your page. You would have defined an action on your controller whose responsibility it is to populate each of the small view models and return the view for that model.
<div id="leftCol">
#{Html.RenderAction("LeftCol", "Controller");}
</div>
<div id="midCol">
#{Html.RenderAction("MiddleCol", "Controller");}
</div>
<div id="rightCol">
#{Html.RenderAction("RightCol", "Controller");}
</div>
This would give you the ability to use the sub parts anywhere on your site and you only have to define the action method and partial views once.
The second option is also a personal favorite because you can quickly leverage JQuery to do partial page loading if these sections take a few seconds to populate and render (if this makes sense for your page). Now, your page opens quickly, you have a JS function that goes and fetches these sections, put a little loading graphic over them and are loaded/rendered using an AJAX request. Again, only if this makes sense for you, but using the Partial Views/Render action methods typically give you more flexibility in reuse across the site and AJAX partial page rendering.
I am trying to come up with a clean design for this -
I am using MVC to process orders, so I have an 'order' entity, with its own controller and views.
From the Create Order view I would like the user to add a 'Customer' entity. I have a controller and CRUD operations for 'customer'.
When someone creates a new Order I would like them to either
1) enter a customer name to see if that customer already exists, and if so, add that Customer to the Order, or
2) Create a new Customer then add that new Customer to the Order.
My problem is I am not sure of a good way to access the Customers from within the Order.
-do I create a partial view for Create Customer, then use that view in the Customer Create AND Order Create?
-then would I create a partial view 'SearchCustomers' that passes params to an action on Customer controller and that returns results? Would I be able to reuse this across the site?
You can see I am not sure about a few things - are partial views the way to reuse things? can partial views be reused across controllers and access different controllers from the ones theyre in?
I have gone through an MVC book and online tutorials but they all seem to use beginner examples, where Model objects don't contain other Model objects.
Thanks for help
Views never "access controllers".
The flow is:
Controller Action Method -> Creates View Model -> Hands it off to a View -> View displays it -> View can pass sub-models on to other partial views
Decomposing everything into smaller models and partial views (or using Editor templates) is a good approach. You can then assemble those smaller models into a larger view model for a complete page, or you can use the ViewBag to assemble them in a non-strongly typed manner.
I'm porting an existing system to ASP.NET MVC2. In the current legacy app, the user can select from dozens of available fields to customize CRUD forms for different entities in the domain model, similar to the way ERP systems allow customization of core modules.
My question: I'm looking for a good pattern or example for this kind of behavior in ASP.NET MVC2. It seems to me it's rather like creating a ViewModel dynamically based upon user choices, or perhaps the right approach is data-driven view pages that aren't strongly-typed where I can reflect over the results client-side to determine field headings or something -- if that makes sense :). Or maybe I can drive AutoMapper or similar dynamically # runtime based on user choices?
The underlying domain model is EF4-based and I'm using a simple Repository pattern # present for the ViewModel.
TIA for any input! Michael
If I didn't find anything else that matched the needs and went on to do it custom, I would:
Use the ViewModel with all the fields / not just the ones the user picked.
Pass both the ViewModel and the view configuration to the view
Call some html helper that for each item in the configuration adds a field with the corresponding property in the model
The configuration could be passed as either part of a containing ViewModel or in a separate entry in ViewData
Depending on what you need, building/passing the view configuration could be put in an Action Filter. Alternatively the helper could pull it directly.
A different approach is if you need completely custom fields. I mean user defined fields. If that's the scenario, that's not typed at the controller level already, so I'd pass the list of fields/values to the view. The view can do a foreach on those adding the fields. Again that could be moved to a HtmlHelper.
My MVC application contains a parent model, which will contain 1 or more child models.
I have set up the main view to display properties from the parent model, and then loop through a collection of my child models (of various types, but all inheriting from the same base type). Each of the child models have a corresponding partial view.
My "parent" view iterates over the child models like this:
foreach (ChildBase child in ViewData.Model.Children)
{
Html.RenderPartial("Partials/"+child.ChildType.ToString()+"Child",
section);
}
My application has the appropriate /Partials/ChildType1.ascx, ChildType2.ascx, etc. Everything works great.
Is this an appropriate way to use Partial Views? It feels slightly off-kilter due to the dynamic names, but I don't know another way to perform dynamic selection of the proper view without resorting to a big switch statement.
Is it advisable to use the same view for multiple "modes" of the same model? I would like to use the same .ascx for displaying the "read only" view of the model, as well as an edit form, based on which Controller Action is used to return the view.
Iconic,
It's difficult to answer the questions without knowing exactly what you're trying to achieve.
I'll have a go though:
If you're familiar with web forms, think of your partial view as a webforms usercontrol for the moment and think of the part of your model that is relevant to your partial views as a 'fragment of information' that want to pass across to the partial view.
Natural choices for using a partial view would be for elements used in many views across your site.
So ... in answer:
1.Although what you are doing is valid, it doesn't seem quite correct. An example of a partial view I have used might be a row in a grid of data where you'd call the partial view passing in the row object as its model:
foreach (MyObject o in Model.objects)
{
Html.RenderPartial("Shared/gridRowForObject.ascx", o, ViewData);
}
You can strongly type your views also to expect a specific type to be passed through as the Model object.
Again another use might be a login box or a 'contact me form' etc.
2._Ultimately this is a personal design decision but I'd go for the option that requires the least application/presentation logic and the cleanest code in your view. I'd tend to avoid writing to many conditional calls in your view for example and by inferring a base type to pass across to all of your partial views as in your example, may well tie you down.
When learning the MVC framework I found the Oxite code to be useful.
I hope that helps.