Question

I have an issue with the project I’m working on. I’m using Entity Framework. Some quick background on the db model:

public class AssetType{
    public ICollection<Field> Fields { get; set; }
}

public class Field{
    public int Id {get;set;
    public string Name {get;set;
}

Now I’m creating a view that would create a new Asset Type. As part of this process the user must also create all of the fields they want for that type. The issue is that I’m not sure how to represent the list of “Fields” on the page. The idea is that the user can add a new field, or remove one at any time with jQuery.

I can’t figure how the data could be posted back to the server as part of the form. I thought about constructing the list in JSON form, but this seemed a bit messy. Has anyone got any better ideas?

Answer 1

You’re going to have problems with this. The object parser does not handle complex objects very well. Collections usually need to be primitive types, or collections of primitive types themselves.

There are ways to do it, but if this is a requirement for you, I would look at storing your data in a JSON string variable, and parsing it where/ when needed.