Question

I am working on asp.net MVC 3 project. I am using EF 4.1 code first approach. I have entity class called disputes. It maps to a table in database name tblDisptes. It has three properties names Lastviewedby, Lastupdatedby, LastRespondedBy … all three integers. I have created a viewmodel ‘disputeviewmodel’ with three more properties Lastviewedbyname, Lastupdatedbyname, LastRespondedByname and a property named dispute. Now my repository function returns list of disputes. how to convert this list to List of disputeviewmodel so that these three properties are filled with the names ?

Please suggest.

Answer 1

Your view model doesn’t really need a property named dispute. A view model should not reference your domain models.

As far as the mapping is concerned one possibility is to manually do it but that could quickly become cumbersome with more complex models:

public ActionResult Foo()
{
    IEnumerable<disputes> disputes = ... fetch from repo
    IEnumerable<disputeviewmodel> disputeViewModels = disputes.Select(x => new disputeviewmodel
    {
        Lastviewedbyname = x.Lastviewedby,
        Lastupdatedbyname = x.Lastupdatedby,
        LastRespondedByname = x.LastRespondedBy
    });
    return View(disputeViewModels);
}

So a better approach would be to use AutoMapper:

public ActionResult Foo()
{
    IEnumerable<disputes> disputes = ... fetch from repo
    IEnumerable<disputeviewmodel> disputeViewModels = Mapper.Map<IEnumerable<disputes>, IEnumerable<disputeviewmodel>>(disputes);
    return View(disputeViewModels);
}