Question

I am still clueless how to start preparing a form like this on MVC 3.

I am a beginner and all I have learned till now is to bind data from controller to the strongly typed view. But as I know that we can return only one varibale from the return statment

public ActionResult(int id)
{
// Do some logic
return View(role);
}

Now the above code return the role list to the view. But how would I pass other details also like Licence state, organization.. etc *

Another complex example:

Let say my form need to display details like Country [drop down], State [Drop down], Department [ComboBox list], Organization [radio button list], List of all employee [table/Grid]

How would I display all the controls value with single RETURN?

Note: * I assume that all the detials like role, Licence state, Organization etc I am fetching from database.

I hope I am clear with my explanation, please let me know if I need to explain it bit further.

Also, I am sorry for this stupid question, this is because I am in my very first learning stage of MVC

Answer 1

You would write a view model:

public class MyViewModel
{
    public SomeModel1 Section1 { get; set; }
    public SomeModel2 Section2 { get; set; }
    public SomeModel3 Section3 { get; set; }
}

and in your controller action you will return this view model to the view:

public class HomeController: Controller
{
    public ActionResult Index()
    {
        var model = new MyViewModel
        {
            Section1 = ...,
            Section2 = ...,
            Section3 = ...,
        };
        return View(model);
    }

    [HttpPost]
    public ActionResult Index(MyViewModel model)
    {
        ... process the model when the form is submitted
    }
}

and in the view:

@model MyViewModel
@using (Html.BeginForm())
{
    @Html.EditorFor(x => x.Section1)
    @Html.EditorFor(x => x.Section2)
    @Html.EditorFor(x => x.Section3)
    ...
}

and of course you will have strongly typed editor templates for each section:

• ~/Views/Shared/EditorTemplates/SomeModel1.cshtml
• ~/Views/Shared/EditorTemplates/SomeModel2.cshtml
• ~/Views/Shared/EditorTemplates/SomeModel3.cshtml
• …

which will represent the partial contents of each section