Question

I have a view that will look like this:

I’m trying to figure out how I should represent my ViewModel for this view. Each “Agency” can have multiple “Business Units” and each “Business Unit” can have several “Clients”.

In the database I easily represent this with a mapping table and foreign keys for the Agency, BusinessUnit and Client tables.

However, now I need to use LINQ to query this data out of the database and then construct a ViewModel object that represents this tree-like structure so my View can render it.

Can anyone give me tips on what data-structure I should use, or what my ViewModel might look like for this hierarchical structure in C# code? I need to create my ViewModel object to pass on to this view.

Any suggestions on how to represent the ViewModel are appreciated!

Answer 1

Just store a List instance in your view data?

public class Agency
{
   public List<BusinessUnit> Units;
   public string Name;
   public int NumberOfAccounts
   {
      get 
      {
         int ret = 0;
         foreach(BusinessUnit unit in units)
            ret += unit.NumberOfAccounts;
         return ret;
      }
   }
   // ... continue this strategy for other properties
}
public class BusinessUnit
{
   public List<Client> clients;
   public string Name;
   public int NumberOfAccounts
   {
      get 
      {
         int ret = 0;
         foreach(Client client in clients)
            ret += client.NumberOfAccounts;
         return ret;
      }
   }
   // ... continue this strategy for other properties

}
public class Client
{
   public string Name;
   public int NumberOfAccounts;
}