Question

I have An EntityModel that is named ECommerceEntities that contains several entities. If I want to use this model in a view in asp.net mvc, Can I pass ECommerceEntities instance to view or Sould I pass one entity in ECommerceEntities.

I mean :

//Can I use this?
public ActionResult Index()
{
   ECommerceEntities entity = new ECommerceEntities();
   return View(entity);
}

or

//Should I use this?
public ActionResult Index()
{
   ECommerceEntities.OneEntity one_entity = new ECommerceEntities.OneEntity();

   //filling one_entity here and then send to view

   return View(one_entity );
}

Thanks.

Answer 1

If you are asking if it is possible, it is possible to do both. Yes, both options will work. However if you only need the sub entity in the view, I would just pass the sub entity into the view. No use in passing in more than needed right?

Do not forget that in MVC whatever object you pass in to your view,(EcommerceEntities for example) can have its properties set in the post by MVC’s automatic model binding which maps data from the post into the object you pass into the view.

So, this means that someone can hijack the http post and can fill in EcommerceEntities and its sub entities with various bits of random data of their choosing if you are not careful and you may accidentally save this data to your db because you did not expect some of these properties to get set.

So, when working in MVC you have to protect properties that are not being used in your view but are passed into the view to ensure that nobody has injected them.

If you do decide to pass in EcommerceEntities, make sure that you use whitelisting or look at MVC’s bind attribute to protect your data when your entity is posted back to your controller.

Because of the work involved in protecting that much extra data, I would say that the sub entity would be best if the screen will populate correctly just off of the sub entity object.

Hopefully this is helpful.