Question

I am sure this is relatively simple, I just keep running into brick walls. I have two entity classes set up like so:

public class Post
{
    public int Id { get; set; }
    public string Title { get; set; }
    public DateTime CreatedDate { get; set; }
    public string Content { get; set; }
    public string Tags { get; set; }
    public ICollection<Comment> Comments { get; set; }
}

public class Comment
{
    public int Id { get; set; }
    public string DisplayName { get; set; }
    public string Email { get; set; }
    public DateTime DateCreated { get; set; }
    public string Content { get; set; }
    public int PostId { get; set; }
    public Post Post { get; set; }
}

And I set up my ViewModel like this:

public class PostCommentViewModel
{
    public Post Post { get; set; }
    public IQueryable<Comment> Comment { get; set; }

    public PostCommentViewModel(int postId)
    {
        var db = new BlogContext();

        Post = db.Posts.First(x => x.Id == postId);
        Comment = db.Comments;
    }
}

And I have my Controller doing this:

public ActionResult Details(int id = 0)
    {
        var viewModel = new PostCommentViewModel(id);
        return View(viewModel);
    }

And then the view looks like this:

@model CodeFirstBlog.ViewModels.PostCommentViewModel


<fieldset>
<legend>PostCommentViewModel</legend>
@Html.DisplayFor(x => x.Post.Title)
<br />
@Html.DisplayFor(x => x.Post.Content)
<br />
@Html.DisplayFor(x => x.Post.CreatedDate)
<hr />    
@Html.DisplayFor(x => x.Comment)
</fieldset>

The result IS displaying data, but not quite what I want for the comments.

You see that the comments (There are two of them) and just showing the id property on each one “12”

How can I get it to go into and display the comment details specific to this particular post? I imagine a foreach loop is in order, but i cant figure out how to drill into the Model.Comment property correctly.

I tried this:

@foreach(var item in Model.Comment)
{
@Html.DisplayFor(item.DisplayName)
@Html.DisplayFor(item.Content)
@Html.DisplayFor(item.DateCreated)
}

But the error I get is “The type arguments for method ‘System.Web.Mvc.Html.DisplayExtensions.DisplayFor(System.Web.Mvc.HtmlHelper, System.Linq.Expressions.Expression>)’ cannot be inferred from the usage. Try specifying the type arguments explicitly.”

Not sure what I am supposed to do here..

Answer 1

Loop around the comments model:

@model CodeFirstBlog.ViewModels.PostCommentViewModel


<fieldset>
<legend>PostCommentViewModel</legend>
@Html.DisplayFor(x => x.Post.Title)
<br />
@Html.DisplayFor(x => x.Post.Content)
<br />
@Html.DisplayFor(x => x.Post.CreatedDate)
<hr />    
@foreach(var comment in Model.Comment) {
    @Html.DisplayFor(x => comment)
}
</fieldset>