Question

I cannot seem to figure out how to access my Model from my View. I am confused.

Here is my Home controller. I have verified that “specimens” is being populated with data from the database:

public class HomeController : Controller
{
    wildtropEntities wildlifeDB = new wildtropEntities();

    public ActionResult Index()
    {
        ViewData["CurrentDate"] = System.DateTime.Now.ToString("MM/dd/yyyy");

        var specimens = from s in wildlifeDB.specimen1
                        select s;

        return View(specimens);
    }

}

And here are couple snippets from my View:

<%@ Page Language="C#" MasterPageFile="~/Views/Shared/Site.Master" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage" %>

<% foreach (WildlifeTropical.Models.specimen s in ??????)
    { %>
     <div>s.Name</div>
 <% } %>

I assumed I would be able to access “specimens” since I passed it to the View from the Controller (ie, return View(specimens))…but it isn’t working.

Answer 1

You will have to make your view strongly typed to a collection of specimen which is what you are passing to it from your controller action (IEnumerable<specimen>):

<%@ Page 
    Language="C#" 
    MasterPageFile="~/Views/Shared/Site.Master" 
    Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage<IEnumerable<WildlifeTropical.Models.specimen>>" %>

<% foreach (WildlifeTropical.Models.specimen s Model) { %>
     <div><%= Html.Encode(s.Name) %></div>
<% } %>

Notice how the view inherits System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage<IEnumerable<WildlifeTropical.Models.specimen>> and it is now strongly typed to a collection of specimens that you will be able to loop through.

This being said, personally I don’t like writing foreach loops in my views. They make them look ugly. In this case I would use a display template:

<%@ Page 
    Language="C#" 
    MasterPageFile="~/Views/Shared/Site.Master" 
    Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage<IEnumerable<WildlifeTropical.Models.specimen>>" %>
<%= Html.DisplayForModel() %>

and then I would define a display template which will automatically be rendered for each element of the model collection (~/Views/Shared/DisplayTemplates/specimen.ascx):

<%@ Control 
    Language="C#" 
    Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewUserControl<WildlifeTropical.Models.specimen>" %>
<div>
    <%= Html.DisplayFor(x => x.Name) %>
</div>

See how the specimen.ascx user control is now strongly typed to System.Web.Mvc.ViewUserControl<WildlifeTropical.Models.specimen>. This is because it will be rendered for each specimen of the main view model.