Question

I am doing my first project in ASP.NET MVC and using the NerdDinner sample project in ScottGu’s book as a guide. In his project, all his strongly typed views neatly correspond to the objects he defined (e.g. Dinner). That is not really reality of a business application.

For instance, in my app, a page (e.g. View) gets most of its information from the primary object that the strongly typed View was created from. But it also has to display information from a dozen other objects.

So, what is the preferred pattern of passing all this information into the View?

• Do I pass the primary object via the Model and the rest of the info via ViewData?
• Do I create a master object for each View that encompasses all the data I might need for that page?
• Is there a better approach?

Answer 1

You may define your strongly typed View with Data Transfer Object.

Ex: Your View needs a Student list and a Teacher List, then you may define a data transfer object (wrapper):

public class FrontPageDTO
{
    public List<Student> StudentList { get; set; }
    public List<Teacher> TeacherList { get; set; }
}

Then pass an instance of this DTO to your View.