Question

I have a query where I need to get post + every tag that it has. But since Tags are in separate table it makes things hard for me for two reasons. I am not really sure that I even need to pass two values, maybe I can do this somehow differently.

Note that Model is created automatically using LINQ to SQL Classes.

---

DB

Code

public ActionResult Edit(int id)
{
    // Get post from DB
    var post = (from p in _db.Posts
                where p.ID == id
                select p).Single();

    // Get PostTags from DB
    var postTag = (from pt in _db.PostTags
                   where pt.PostID == id
                   select pt);

    // Now looping through PostTags in order to find all tag names associated with the post
    string tagList = string.Empty;
    foreach (var pt in postTag)
    {
        var tag = (from t in _db.Tags
                   where t.ID == pt.TagID
                   select t).Single();
        tagList += tag.Name + " ";
    }
    return Content(tagList); // This works as intended, outputs all tags for current post

    return View(); // How can I return post itself + tagList ?
}

Problem

1. As you can see I want to pass post to my view and it makes sense, but I need to somehow pass the tagList string that contains tags as well. How can I do that?

2. I think my query is bad. I’m not experienced with SQL/LINQ so this is the only thing that I came up with. Maybe I can do the same thing somewhat "smarter"?

Okey, thank you for answers. Both ViewBag and creating BlogViewModel are good. I will go with BlogViewModel I think. But my second question still remains.

Answer 1

Have you considered creating a ViewModel that would hold both of these objects, and passing that ViewModel to your View? You can also use LINQ to improve your queries.

(Note : I’m posting this from my phone so the syntax could be off)

Model:

public class TaggingModel
{
   public string TagList {get; set;}
   public PostClass Post {get; set;}
}

public TaggingModel(string tagList, Post post)
{
    this.TagList = tagList;
    this.YourPost = post;
}

Code (using LINQ):

var post = _db.Posts.Where(pt => pt.PostID == id).Single();
var postTags = post.PostTags.Where(pt => pt.PostID == id);

string tagList = string.Empty;

foreach(var pt in postTags)
{
     var tag = _db.Tags.Where(t => t.ID == pt.TagID).Single(); 
     tagList += tag.Name + " ";
}

TaggingModel model = new TaggingModel(tagList, post);

return View(model);

You could also use other methods to send the message across, such as storing them in the ViewData if you didn’t want to implement a Model for it.