Help with asp.net mvc form with multiple models

Question

I am having a little trouble figuring how to do this.

here's my scenario

A User must create a IncomeDeclaration for his Business.

But an IncomeDeclaration includes many ActivityIncomeDeclarations for each Activity that his business is on.

I would like my form to include the fields for the new IncomeDeclaration as well as the fields for the ActivityIncomeDeclarations (which will be obviously related to that IncomeDeclaration)....

I know that rubyonrails has a method called "accepts_nested_attributes_for" tgat would probably help me here..

Please help!

Answer 1

This is very easy to achieve. ASP NET MVC is very compositional and you can use templates to achieve this but inheritance is not the way to go.

so solution is for IncomeDeclaration to contain a list of ActivityIncomeDeclarations and then do this:

for(int i=0; i< Model.Activities.Count; i++) { Html.EditorFor(Model.Activities[i]); // you need an editor template (and a display template) for ActivityIncomeDeclarations } 

More info:

http://www.asp.net/mvc/videos/mvc2-template-customization http://www.dalsoft.co.uk/blog/index.php/2010/04/26/mvc-2-templates/

Answer 2

This blog post of mine can help you lots:

Asp.net MVC model binding to List<T>

But basically you will provide fields for your IncomeDeclaration and then dynamically add ActivityIncomeDeclaration fields as needed.

If you want to actually serialize the form you will have to follow instruction provided in the upper blog post.

But there's the second choice as well if you use jQuery. You could manipulate a complex JavaScript object that would be a copy of the same server side C# class like:

var incDec = { Name: "" // and other properties ActivityIncomeDeclarations: [] }; 

Then while user would be adding those ActivityIncomeDeclarations you'd always simply call

incDec.ActivityIncomeDeclarations.push({ // properties }); 

Then my other blog post will help you that can convert this object to a Dictionary that jQuery for instance is easily able to process:

Sending complex JSON objects to Asp.net MVC using jQuery

By using the prlogin the blog post you could then just easily do:

$.ajax({ url: "someURL", type: "POST", data: $.toDictionary(incDec), success: function(data, status, xhr){ // process success }, error: function(xhr, status, err){ // process error } });