Question

Does anyone know of any examples or tutorials of an MVC view that shows parent/child data all on one form, and allows all the child records to be editable?

For example, say I have a table of people and another containing the vehicles they own. One one form, I want to show every vehicle for a given person, and make the data elements editable (i.e. license plate number, car color, etc.) in case there are mistakes. I don’t want to jump to a separate edit form for each vehicle.

My attempts thus far have gotten me to the point where I can display the data, but I can’t get it to post back to the controller. I’ve tried to narrow down the problem as far as I could here, but I’m still not getting it, and I think a broader example may be in order. Any ideas?

Answer 1

You can try something like this.

Suppose you have this object :

public class Vehicle {     public int VehicleID { get; set; }     public string LicencePlate { get; set; }     public string Color { get; set; } } 

And this is your controller action that you’ll use to edit vehicle details (where you’ll post the form) :

[AcceptVerbs(HttpVerbs.Post)] public ActionResult EditVehicles(int Owner, Vehicle[] vehicles) {     //manipulate the data, then return back to the list     return RedirectToAction('YourAction'); } 

Then you should set your form this way :

<!--have a form for each person, listing their vehicles--> <form action='/EditVehicles' method='post'>     <input type='hidden' name='Owner' value='25' />     <input type='hidden' name='Vehicles[0].VehicleID' value='10' />     <input type='text' name='Vehicles[0].LicencePlate' value='111-111' />     <input type='text' name='Vehicles[0].Color' value='Red' />     <input type='hidden' name='Vehicles[1].VehicleID' value='20' />     <input type='text' name='Vehicles[1].LicencePlate' value='222-222' />     <input type='text' name='Vehicles[1].Color' value='Blue' />     <input type='submit' value='Edit' /> </form> 

This will help the DefaultModelBinder to correctly bind the form data to your model in your controller. Thus Response.Write(vehicles[1].Color); on your controller, will print ‘Blue’.

This is a very simple example, but I’m sure you get the idea. For more examples about binding forms to arrays, lists, collections, dictionaries, take a look at here.