Question

I am fairly new to MVC 3 and I was tasked with creating a to-do list, that has got timestamps for every independent variable, so when one variable changes, the timestamp of when it was changed would appear on the text field of that variable and not change the other timestamps of the other variables i.e each variable would have an individual timestamp. I believe I can only or most likely achieve this by creating an array. Any ideas on how I can carry this out?

I dummy code would be really appreciated

Here’s a sample of my model, I followed this tutorial http://www.asp.net/mvc/tutorials/getting-started-with-aspnet-mvc3/cs/intro-to-aspnet-mvc-3

---

public class Checklist
{
public int ID { get; set; }

    public string Title { get; set; }

    public string Status { get; set; }

    [Display(Name = "Start Date")]
    public string Start_Date { get; set; }

    [Display(Name = "Complesion Date")]
    public string Complesion_Date { get; set; }

    public DateTime[] Timestamp
    {
        get { return timestamp; }
        set { timestamp = value; }

    [Display(Name = "Internal Review System Reference")]
    public string Internal_Review_System_Reference { get; set; }

    [Display(Name = "Assignment from Original Owner")]
    public bool Assignment_from_Original_Owner { get; set; }

    public class listDBContext : DbContext
{
    public DbSet<Checklist> List { get; set; }
}  

---

And here’s a sample of my controller code

    public class SybreController : Controller 
{
    private listDBContext db = new listDBContext();
    private Checklist check = new Checklist();
    private string oldTitle { get; set; }
    private string oldStatus { get; set; }

public ActionResult Edit(int id)// Called when edit button is clicked
{

        Checklist checklist = db.List.Find(id);
        this.oldTitle = checklist.Title;
        this.oldStatus = checklist.Status;
        //initAllArrays(checklist);//initialize our arrays with previous values
        return View(checklist);
    }
[HttpPost]
    public ActionResult Edit(Checklist checklist)
    {
        if (ModelState.IsValid)
        {              

            checklist.Timestamp = DateTime.Now;
            if (checklist.Title != this.oldTitle)
            {
                checklist.stamps[0] = DateTime.Now;
            }
            if (checklist.Status != this.oldStatus)
            {
                checklist.stamps[1] = DateTime.Now;
            }
            else
            { checklist.stamps[1] = checklist.stamps[1]; }

            db.Entry(checklist).State = EntityState.Modified;
            db.SaveChanges();

return RedirectToAction(“Index”);

Basically I need an timestamp for every individual variable in my model, so that when edited, the timestamp corresponded to when it was edited, the problem I’ve been facing is the timestamp variable changes across all the variables instead of only the one which was changed. I just need the program to print the former timestamp from when it was last edited, and if edited, display the current time along side the text field.
Hope you understand -__-

Answer 1

You can’t solve your problem in this way. Asp.net MVC is stateless, it means that the instance of the controller is created per every request. It means that the checks that you have performed to set time stamps have always true value, as oldTitle and oldStatus are nulls.